Design for transformation. Unlock competencies for coping complexity.

After almost three years since the Covid outbreak, the structural damages the pandemic wreaked are finally becoming more evident than the death toll. A growing crisis that affects the public sector, families, and companies is anticipated by failed businesses and routines that have been disturbed by the fear of the invisible. The university enters this situation as a strategic place for research and a training ground for experts who will steer the transformation. Grounded on a vision of design as a force of change, the Imagis Lab research group has investigated the different meanings of “design and transformation” since 2015, probing the transformative skills of distant professional worlds. The focus has been on understanding design’s role in promoting change processes. So to know how to be a human and professional anchor capable of activating contemporary, sustainable and long-lasting organisational change. The first part of the paper will provide a description of the main actions and insights from the Research Through Design approach. The research, started in 2018 and still ongoing, begins with an insight: digital transformation is human-driven. This a statement that prompted us to investigate the role that design, marketing and communication can play in organisational change processes. The second part of the paper is devoted to presenting the reflections on the transformative competencies inherent to the design practice, among which are: emotional agility (listening for self and others); leadership (motivation for self and others); creativity (breaking from automatism and identifying an actual solution); storytelling (insight and creation of new meanings). As a result, we propose to look at the design(er) as a figure able to challenge contemporary complexity (strategy) through active listening and empathy (human-driven approach) for identifying contemporary solutions (marketing, product, and service) developed by sequencing seemingly distant dots (design) and conveyed through new meanings (storytelling).