Strategic Design as a Boundary Object [transformative] Social Innovation: a Potential Approach to Participatory Projects

The capabilities of Design encompass, among others, the ability to organize, identify and solve problems, and the creative capacity to conceive and try new ideas for building more efficient future scenarios. Design for Sustainability has been discussed as a pathway to guide the societal transformations, while Design for Social Innovation includes the communities in the center of the process. As these expanded perspectives create systemic contexts of intervention, design engages in complex scenarios collaborating in the co-design of a range of services. Such contexts pose Strategic Design as a key element to support connections with multiple actors which operate across collective solutions, sustained by operational methods and value co-production. The aim of this work is to present an approach to strategic design for transformative social innovation initiatives. As an exploratory and qualitative research, it combines systematic and non-systematic literature review to interconnect the discussed topics. The main findings comprise the statement about the capacity of strategic design to operate as a boundary object, the role of research in relation to design and the potential of university as an open system.