A pragmatic path for strategic design: Influences from industrial design, cognitive studies and management sciences

Strategic design is a research field that was born in Italy, specifically at the Politecnico di Milano. Approaches with the same designation have been observed in other scientific communities, but they tend to be weakly in its theoretical perspectives. In this paper, an approach that derive from strategic design in its Italian roots is described, which is here broadly descried as pragmatic strategic design (PSD). The basis of the pragmatist view on this research field is explored, and the key characteristics of PSD are described. PSD is committed with real-life practical applications of Design in organizations. It privileges practice-based action, but extrapolates mere technical approaches, preferring to design product-service-systems. PSD is multidisciplinary. The variables that will be considered in the design are operationally described. It is concerned with user experience, since it represents a strategic issue for many organizations. It deals with intuition though metadesign. PSD is focused on for preferred outcomes, rather than for likely ones. Key-words: strategic design, pragmatic strategic design, pragmatic design, pragmatism.