The Materials of Design Strategy

As with all professionals, designers are defining a space for themselves that can’t be relegated to a machine. One of the places they are finding comfort is in the context of strategy. Strategy is embodied, interpretative, and always contextual, and these are qualities that are proving impossible for an LLM to mimic. If a designer is going to contribute to a design strategy, I think they need to have a refined level of craft and an intimacy with material.

A material can be purposefully manipulated to create something valuable. In painting, material includes paint; in ceramics, it includes clay. Materials don’t need to be physical—it’s been argued that the material of interaction design is behavior [1].

But what are the materials of design strategy?

There are at least two: an organization’s existing products and the attitudes and values of the designers in the organization. That’s fairly abstract, so I will make these ideas tangible by leveraging a classic articulation of the craft of business strategy by Henry Mintzberg, published in 1987 [2].

Products as Material

In his argument for a craft of business strategy, Mintzberg describes that leaders need to have an intimacy with the material of an organization, that is, a deep knowledge of one single business, not of some general quality of all businesses. Mintzberg uses a grocery entrepreneur as an example: Sam Steinberg, who ran the largest supermarket chain in Quebec. Prior to selling the company for $1.3 billion in 1989 ($3.6 billion in today’s dollars), Steinberg was “intimately involved with all of the details of his business, [spending] Saturday mornings visiting his stores” [2]. This executive was physically immersed in the business. To gain that intimacy, he knew details of the day-to-day business operations. More specifically, the substance of his strategy was the business operations themselves.

The parallel material in design strategy is a company’s products: These are the things that can be manipulated, but doing this effectively requires tacit knowledge, which is learned through experience. This happens by using the products a lot, just like when Steinberg visited his stores each Saturday. The material of design strategy is what a company’s current products do, how they do it, and how people experience them.

For example, a common strategic challenge designers face is merging multiple products into one. When one company buys another, or when two feature sets are going to be combined, a design strategist needs to come up with a plan for the integration. Simply saying “we’ll have a unified product” doesn’t make it so; they need to design something to explain the approach. But the strategist isn’t doing interaction or visual design work. They are crafting the plan for integration. Craft requires intimate knowledge of the material: the products themselves. This “knowing” is at a detail level, such as how a reset password flow feels, or how long a workflow takes to complete, or the specific hex values of colors used to direct a user’s attention. The only way to gain this knowledge at a tacit level is by using the products continually, which develops the experience necessary to treat those same products as materials.

I had a client who led design at a very large company, and I was astounded to learn that they had never used their own products. They argued that they had too many products, with too many features; they had too much to do, so they prioritized other activities and delegated product understanding to their product leads. But if one of the materials of design strategy are the products a company has made, then it’s impossible to competently manipulate that material without knowing its strengths and weaknesses. Without using the products themselves, it’s impossible to know what the material can do and how far it can be flexed and pushed without breaking.

Values as Material

Mintzberg also indicates that a business strategy is often formed in a “grass roots” style. Strategies, he explains, “grow like weeds in a garden” [2]. They become established “when they become collective, that is, when they proliferate to guide the behavior of the organization at large.” For this proliferation to be managed, we can see a second material of design strategy: the material of opinions, knowledge, and priorities of the designers themselves. For a design strategy to succeed, designers need to believe it’s the right strategy to pursue. It may seem immoral to view someone else’s opinions as material that can be shaped, yet that’s exactly what happens through what Tom Peters and Robert Waterman have called “management by walking around” [3]—gaining, and shaping, an understanding of the business by engaging directly with the people who are doing the work.

In design, this is the work of creative direction—engaging with the designers to see and influence what they are designing. Designers respect one thing more than anything else: someone’s ability to make things. To influence the material of designers means gaining their respect by making artifacts that they value. Doing design strategy means making things not as ends in themselves, but as tools on the way to shaping the perspectives of the individuals on the team. This requires walking a fine line to avoid micromanagement—showing just enough to nudge but not too much to force.

It also requires spending hands-on time with designers, not just design managers. In an organization with hundreds of designers, this may not feel possible for someone in leadership, and it’s tempting to look for some sort of proxy, to try to identify a scaling amplifier, such as a design system or layers of dependable creative directors. But counterintuitively, this serves to further separate a design strategist from the material—it inserts a level of abstraction between the potter and the clay. Just as Steinberg prioritized visiting his own stores on weekends, a leader who is setting design strategy can elect to spend their time on what they value. To manipulate the material of the designers requires showing a meaningful competence in designing. A designer who cannot make things will have a hard time changing the hearts and minds of those who can, and so at scale, a design-strategist-as-leader needs to find moments to show that they can make things. This may be through targeted livestreamed workshops where they produce artifacts for all to see or by visibly participating in critiques with individual practitioners by drawing and making, not simply speaking.

Patterns in the Craft of Strategy

Evidence of strategy can be found by looking for historic patterns inside an organization. Business patterns, for Mintzberg, are stylistic approaches to strategy that a business has tried in the past. A business may be the type of business that acquires other businesses or a type of business that competes on cost. These qualities may not be explicitly acknowledged anywhere, but one can discern them by looking at the various strategies the company has tried. Mintzberg observes the similarity to art production, explaining that “anyone reviewing a chronological lineup of our craftsman’s work would have little trouble discerning clear patterns, at least in certain periods” [2]. These patterns are not always purposeful: “Our potter is in the studio, rolling clay to make wafer like sculpture. The clay sticks to the rolling pin, and a round form appears. Why not make a cylindrical vase?” [2] This is pattern development through making, showing that patterns are emergent, not prescribed. In business, Mintzberg argues that “the natural propensity to experiment, even boredom, likely stimulate strategic change” [2].

Product design, in an organization, has patterns as well. These patterns have often grown out of the history of a company’s digital strategy (or, as is often the case, lack thereof). The ways a set of products look, feel, and act at a large bank have emerged over as long as the bank has had digital products. One isn’t bound to those patterns in the future, but the patterns exhibit evidence of strategic inertia. As any creative leader has learned, pushing a step change in a visual aesthetic across an organization, or trying to create and leverage a new set of interaction patterns across multiple products, is extremely difficult. Taking on the challenge means having a true tacit understanding of material, and that means understanding the lineage, or patterning, in the past. Patterns provide clues about the difficulty in executing a particular strategy in the future.

Conclusion

Design strategy has its own materials: an organization’s existing products and the attitudes and values of the people who are doing the design work. Patterns demonstrate the way that material has been shaped in the past. To design a strategy in the future requires an intimacy with these materials and the ability to manipulate them with a sense of craft. Like clay or pixels, these materials are “worked” in an embodied manner, and this means that design strategy is technology-proof. Agentic systems are not going to walk around the design team and spend meaningful time with designers, showing them competency and shifting their stubborn aesthetic opinions. AI is not going to replace deep, qualitative, subjective understanding of the products a company is shipping. This is the material of design strategy, and the job of a design strategist is to gain a depth of hand skills with those materials: the products an organization has designed and the people who are doing the designing.

References and Works Cited

1. Fabricant, R. Behavior is our medium. IxDA Interaction ’09, Vancouver, British Columbia, Mar. 17, 2009; https://bit.ly/3UODJKE
2. Mintzberg, H. Crafting strategy. Harvard Business Review 65 (4), 1987, 66–75.
3. Peters, T. J. and Waterman, R. H. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. HarperBusiness Essentials, 2004.