Michael Roller

Broaden your perspective! Tactical design is, for me, “doing something right” while strategic design is “doing the right thing.” Doing something right is relatively easy as you just need to focus on the task at hand, no more. Doing the right thing requires a designer to be acutely aware of the future into which they are placing their product and recognizing that their product can be a catalyst for change. To that end, designers need to be feeding themselves on what the future will (and could be) like, both from a broad social and cultural perspective, and also from the perspective of production methods and technology. Too often I hear of automotive designers reading design magazines, which deal with stuff that’s already here or very close to it, doing a Google image search, whacking together a mood board and getting down to work designing the future. It’s the same approach that a lot of us took in design school because the course structures didn’t encourage a strongly integrated approach to contextualizing our work with a view to demographics and social and environmental impacts. This approach is too simplistic if designers want their work to be truly significant.

My main tool for contextualizing my work is the amazing network of strategic thinking bloggers, people like Seth Godin, Allan Cochinov and Core77, the team over at PSFK, Re*Move and, of course yourself! Vitally, it’s not about just reading these people, it’s about interacting with them, bouncing ideas around and seeing what I can feed back into my own work. My blog is also an important part of this process as it is a public testing ground for what I am thinking. I also try and keep across current affairs at a micro level in the newspapers and, more broadly, in a few magazines. One of my favourites is Monocle for its coverage of emerging global hot-spots, be they political, creative or inspirational. It treads a nice line between feeding the aesthete in me while also providing the brain snacks that get me thinking.

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