Designing and Strategy

First: any act of designing is a momentary snapshot of its transcendental flow that passes from the future to the past (Brassett, 2013). A design is not a thing, but things are designed & in being so, are refugees from future contexts in the present. To engage in the development of the scenarios that articulate such possible contexts, designers – and the innovators & innovation managers that are driven by shared processes – need to understand both the nature of design’s transcendentally creative flow, & the material & expressive resources (De Landa, 2006) that have been, are & will be deployed by this flow as it coalesces.

Second: strategy, philosopher of Science Michel Serres states in his essay on Lucretius (1982), is about dynamics & energetics, but is first & foremost a topology. While strategy and scenario building are not equivalents, their relation to a space as the contextual locating of time – & possible times – (Bachelard, 1962) will demand a shared cartographic function, even if their outputs differ. Furthermore, the immanent nature of the relationship between the transcendental conditions for action & the material expressions of those conditions will mean that any movement enacting strategic plans, or any scenario narrativising a plan of possible action(s), will change the ontological status of all the components of these fields.

So sparks that result from a collision between strategic-designing & creative-scenario building may illuminate activities that are both future-oriented & materially impactful.