Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, in their Strategic Design Unit in Helsinki,

Strategic design tries to ally pragmatism with imagination, deliver research through prototyping, enable learning from execution, pursue communication through tangible projects, and balance strategic intent and political capital with iterative action, systems thinking and user-centredness.

strategic intent.

The “much larger machine” may not be malleable directly, or even capable of being understood. Yet it can still be affected.

This is Kwinter’s description of “a delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine”.

without the sense that design necessarily knows all.

Thackara’s statement that “out of control” is an ideology, not a fact — that these things are the outcome of policy, one way or another, and so can be reshaped by different policy.) This is not an instrumental or engineering-led idea of design, in which altering the infrastructure, or plumbing, underpinning the current reality will at some point

So design cannot pursue some prescribed rational course of action towards a solution.

not actually