DDD80018 Report On Strategic Design Practice - Project 1

Strategic Design Project 1

You are required to produce a detailed 2000-word, professionally presented report investigating contemporary applications of design thinking to business strategy development and complex problem-solving in organisations.

Your report should:

• Select a case study investigation of the application of design thinking in organisations or communities of any scale.
• Develop a critique of design thinking based on the models you investigate plus the application of design thinking to your case study organisations.
• Include a “Gap Analysis” to identify if there is anything missing from the models and case study that may have resulted in better outcomes.
• Critique and gap analysis should consider the questions as mentioned in the introduction:

• Is this just another management fad, or is design thinking a worthy set of conceptual tools for working on wicked problems?
• Can design thinking deliver what its proponents say it does?
• Can it really enable change agents to effectively practice in complex contexts and contested space?
• Is there anything missing from its conceptual frameworks?

• Based on the Case Study, propose ways to improve design-thinking models to deliver better outcomes.

You should draw on some of the more recent critical writing on design thinking to assist with your critique and access literature from a variety of disciplines as mentioned in the Introduction above. Avoid using non-critical literature. Please bring your case study proposals to Studio sessions for discussion, and to ensure everyone is doing different case studies.

You will also be required to give a 5-minute presentation of your explorations and analysis in Week 5.