Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Strategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life

Thursday, April 21, 2022 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Strategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
Speakers: Dan Hill
Link:

Summary

The infrastructures of everyday life shape how we live together, and what we're about. They might be housing or transit, wifi or civic apps, playgrounds or forests, streets or markets, libraries or health services, participation processes or parking spaces, energy grids or e-bikes. All of these things are designed, of course, though often by disparate design disciplines that have rarely collaborated coherently, and often without integrated or coherent approach to wider governance, either. And all have assumptions, beliefs or motivations embedded within them. Over the last decade, Dan has been helping shape the practice of strategic design, as an integrated, holistic approach to shared societal challenges, By sharing some of his recent work at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency, as well as elsewhere, Dan will describe what it might mean to reorient around social progress, climate resilience and public health, rather than unequal economic growth, poor health, social injustices and environmental degradation. The work suggests various 'battles' for the infrastructures of everyday life, a genuine engagement with the technologies around us, and with new ways of thinking and acting about public and civic sensibilities and structures, participation and practices. Unpacking his concept of ‘dark matter’ in this context, and drawing from multiple projects, Dan shows how traditional lenses of design — from architecture to interaction design — might be trained on these big picture challenges. Recently appointed Director of the Melbourne School of Design, the graduate school in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Dan draws from his wide-ranging career in design leadership roles at the Swedish government's innovation agency in Stockholm, Arup in Sydney and London, the UK government's Future Cities Catapult, the Finnish Innovation Fund, Monocle magazine, and the BBC, roaming across interaction design, service design, architecture and urban design — and ultimately strategic design.

Key Insights

  • Historic shifts in urban design, like 1930s car dominance, drastically reshaped social life in cities, often to their detriment.

  • Strategic design requires questioning the purpose of urban elements before technological solutions are applied.

  • Multi-stakeholder collaboration, including rarely consulted groups like justice systems, is crucial for systemic urban projects.

  • Oslo's bike share program exemplifies integrating public data sharing and social reintegration through prison labor.

  • Designing streets as adaptable, garden-like systems encourages ongoing maintenance and evolution rather than fixed endpoints.

  • Uber and similar services increased congestion despite promises, revealing failures to consider systemic urban impacts.

  • Energy microgrids in shared buildings require social as well as technical design to avoid conflicts and improve sustainability.

  • Indigenous practices demonstrate millennia of successful multi-scale, interconnected design thinking for ecosystems.

  • Strategic design differs from tactical responses by addressing root causes before crises, exemplified by pandemic prevention.

  • Scaling urban solutions needs changes in overarching policies, such as parking laws, rather than isolated interventions.

Notable Quotes

"Those days are over this new big tech is coming in so time to move on."

"We need to step back and ask what's the question behind it?"

"If we put traffic into the street, we'll get traffic; if we put gardeners, we'll get gardens."

"Strategic is what you do when you don’t know what to do, when there’s nothing to do."

"Design the chair inside the room inside the house inside the city plan — see those as connected nested things."

"Uber and Lyft increased traffic congestion by 40 to 50 percent in cities like San Francisco."

"The streets were full of social life, conviviality, commerce, and human-centered mobility."

"We need to design the street with ongoing maintenance and care, not reduce it."

"In Oslo, recently released prisoners maintain the bike sharing fleet, helping reintegrate them into society."

"Indigenous Australians practiced multi-scale interconnected design for 60,000 years — that's extraordinary machine designed by humans."

Ask the Rosenbot
Iulia Cornigeanu
QuantQual Book Club: Small Data
2024 • QuantQual Interest Group
Chelsey Glasson
Exit Interview #3: Same as It Ever Was: What Leaving Tech Taught Me About Change
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jemma Ahmed
Theme 2 Intro
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Laura Gatewood
Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Deanna Zandt
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
2022 • Civic Design Community
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Laureen Kattan
Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Erin Hauber
Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Deanna Washington
Connecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Terry Buckman
Wargaming (An Introduction)
2023 • Enterprise Community
Sheryl Cababa
Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Andrew Michael
Building a Product Insights Team
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Katie Hansen
Experimental research: techniques for deep, psychology-driven insights
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Andrea Gallagher
The Problem Space
2019 • Advancing Research Community

More Videos

Sheri Byrne-Haber

"You’re not supposed to sell to the US public sector unless you’re WCAG 2.0 AA compliant."

Sheri Byrne-Haber

Accessibility at Scale

June 9, 2021

Prayag Narula

"Most users don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Prayag Narula Hannah Hudson

Empowering Designers to do Good Research

March 11, 2022

Janelle Estes

"The hardest skill to recruit for is someone who can consult and ask the right questions to uncover what the request really is."

Janelle Estes

UX Research Trends

January 28, 2021

Craig Brookes

"Finding a leadership champion and building on small wins creates momentum for integrating research and content."

Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn

"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood

June 11, 2021

Marc Fonteijn

"We encourage one-to-one video calls to build rapport and feel comfortable reaching out for advice."

Marc Fonteijn Ru Butler

Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)

December 3, 2024

Kate Towsey

"Research ops provides the roles, tools, and processes needed to support researchers — that’s as concise as it gets."

Kate Towsey

The State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory

June 20, 2019

Alla Weinberg

"Co-regulation means someone who is safe can help bring another out of a triggered state."

Alla Weinberg

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

September 9, 2022

Shawna Hein

"A government designer aims to reduce UX variation while a contractor may optimize only their single product, creating potential conflicts."

Shawna Hein Kevin Hoffman

Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts

November 17, 2022

Tricia Wang

"Every culture has things to celebrate and improve upon; we should learn from others instead of imposing our own standards."

Tricia Wang

SCALE: Discussion

June 15, 2018