Missions Playbook: A design-led approach to launching and driving missions, by the Danish Design Centre

“Missions can be powerful frames for achieving significant societal goals, mobilising resources, linking activities across different disciplines and types of research and innovation, driving systemic change and making it easier for citizens to understand the value of investments in research and innovation [...]

Design and missions are made for each other. Missions are undertaken to provide better answers to grand complex challenges – systemic and wicked problems. Design is an approach suited to tackle exactly that type of problem. In both missions and design, the inherent relationship between problem and solution is that we see the contours of where we are going without knowing exactly how to get there. The thinking, methods, tools and skills design has to offer, provide a way forward in making missions operationable.

The core of design-driven methods is to challenge one’s own assumptions, bring empathy into play, provide space for experiments, and last but not least “rehearse the preferred future” through prototypes. Designers have the ability to apply a holistic perspective and co-create new solutions across disciplines and sectors together with the users. And with strong skills within visualisation, designers manage to make complexity understandable og tangible.

Missions can, therefore, be seen as a design exercise where the capacity of an ecosystem to act in mission-oriented ways is something to be crafted.”

— Danish Design Centre in the Missions Playbook (2021)