Strategy through Design understands strategy as a holistic practice of framing, imagining and directing collective action. It explores how organisations interpret a rapidly shifting world, determine what matters and make decisions amid growing challenges and constraints. Adaptation becomes an ongoing capability: sustaining continuity often requires change, agility and a willingness to engage with the unknown.
This trajectory brings foresight, systems thinking and organisational imagination into conversation with values, purpose and responsibility, particularly as artificial intelligence and agentic systems increasingly influence decision-making. It asks how public and private organisations can develop new possibilities while acknowledging institutional identity and values, attending to trust, memory and knowledge, and considering their social and ecological consequences for individuals and nature.

Public Design examines how design participates in shaping the public domain: the institutions, infrastructures and public discourses through which people live together. It focuses on the conditions of citizenship: how access to public services is organised, how political decisions are explained, how collective decisions are made, how identities are represented and how participation in deliberative processes is facilitated.
This trajectory links democratic life with public institutions and the conditions of public space. It views design as a means of strengthening the conditions for trust, accessibility, accountability and collective agency, whilst acknowledging the unequal distribution of power, information and resources. Public Design asks how design can contribute to a fair, comprehensible and resilient public sphere.

Trust and Design focuses on how trust and distrust function as relations that connect people, organisations, institutions, technologies, and environments. In a world marked by shifting power equations, conflict, polarisation, misinformation, climate uncertainty, algorithmic surveillance and AI-mediated decisions, it investigates how these relations are established, tested, withdrawn and repaired, while situating these questions within the expanded field of design.
Trust is relational, psychosocial and cultural, extending beyond people to the systems, objects, tools, food, media and documents they rely on. Through interfaces, infrastructures, materials and information, design mediates how trust in these is formed, communicated and tested. Its formation is influenced by vulnerability, memory, expectation, social representations and evidence of reliability, clarity, fairness and care, as well as by reciprocity, power, coercion and dependency.
The trajectory distinguishes between primary, reflective, generalised and context-dependent trust. These forms range from presumptive, taken-for-granted trust to trust based on conscious evaluation, experience and evidence. It examines who is expected to trust whom or what, whose accounts are believed and who or what must demonstrate trustworthiness. It recognises justified suspicion, refusal and resistance, and considers how design can make dependencies legible, support verification and redress, and contribute to the repair of trust over time.

Imagining Science investigates how trustworthy knowledge is socially constructed, organised and communicated. Moving beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries, it approaches science as a relational practice shaped through exchange, contestation and collaboration. Academic standards establish shared principles of rigour, transparency and accountability. Yet knowledge production remains plural and situated, reflecting different epistemologies and schools of thought.
Against this backdrop, the trajectory brings together three interrelated areas: strategic innovation in science and educational organisations, addressing institutional transformation and governance; spatial and digital knowledge environments, examining the infrastructures through which formal and informal knowledge is produced and exchanged within science and beyond; and science communication, exploring how the processes and rationales of scientific inquiry can be translated, visualised and mediated to make complex knowledge accessible to diverse publics. Together, these perspectives connect institutional futures and new contemporary modes of knowledge production and dissemination with civic trust and shared frameworks of understanding.

In many ways, design is a political act. Design choices have consequences and are therefore significant. As one of the central trajectories, Design Politics examines how social and (im)material realities are shaped, established and contested. It considers design as a professional practice, a hybrid field of knowledge and a human activity in which users, communities, institutions and private actors intentionally and unintentionally shape outcomes. Decisions concerning symbols, goods, physical and virtual environments and services depend on power, authority, expertise, information, resources and the ability to influence or challenge design processes and proposals.
The political dimension of design appears in how situations are contextualised, problems framed and priorities defined. It is present in the selection of knowledge, the criteria applied, the distribution of capital and the rules governing implementation. It also appears in what is not designed, whose needs are excluded and who is denied influence over decisions.
Designed artefacts can be read and analysed as (im)material traces of the societies in which they are conceived, produced and used. They carry and mediate ideas, convictions, traditions, ideologies and the intentions of those who designed, shaped or commissioned them, professionally or otherwise. Understanding the languages, visual means and forms through which design produces meaning, organises thought and enables communication is central to this inquiry.

This trajectory studies design across its iterative, recursive and non-linear processes through anthropological, sociopolitical and economic prisms: from conception, schools of thought and their epistemologies, education and agenda-setting to commissioning, production, circulation, use practices, adaptation, maintenance and repair, post-use and reuse. It also considers how design intentions diverge from effects, including feedback loops, externalities, waste and material degradation, and how responsibility is allocated and ownership and control are asymmetrically distributed across these processes and their afterlives. This questions the ideal of comprehensive designability: design as a universal cure-all.
Design and its practices are situated within broader social, historical, economic, ecological, technological and geopolitical conditions. Climate adaptation and the transition to a zero-carbon economy raise questions of ecological justice and uneven vulnerability. Dependence on raw materials, critical infrastructures and global supply chains, unequal access to computational systems, AI, other emerging technologies and the new business models associated with them, and rapidly changing geopolitical power dynamics all influence, directly or indirectly, what may take shape, what can be designed, how it can be designed, who owns, shapes and governs the tools, and who can decide. These conditions contribute to the redistribution of agency, creativity, labour and accountability across human and technical systems.

Design Politics focuses on how design participates in the organisation of society, institutions, markets, infrastructures, open-source and proprietary technologies, laws and collective practices. It considers how standards and interoperability shape relations among these domains. It is particularly concerned with how the boundaries between private, collective and public realms blur, are distinguished, defended, organised and governed. It examines how these fields and their dynamics define design, enable or constrain the agency of people as sustainable users, citizens and consumers within the planetary boundaries and shape the mandates and scope for action of designers.

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