Towards a new political economy for collective well-being through strategic design
The following is a work in progress—shared in this form to encourage discussion. I began developing the text while studying Rethinking Capitalism at UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose. I will continue to refine this piece with additional perspectives and references.
Introduction
The challenge to the neoclassical economic orthodoxy—with its static world of rational actors—brought by the likes of Mariana Mazzucato and Michael Jacobs has inspired a new understanding of the role that emerging critical design practices might perform in translating heterodox theory into multi-layered interventions to reshape political economies around collective well-being.
As my journey from 'traditional' design into mission-oriented innovation has unfolded, I have been increasingly persuaded that creative practices may not only help us reimagine and reconfigure the social, institutional, and material architectures that pattern economic life (Boyer et al., 2011; Avelino et al., 2019) but also help transform mental models and narratives to rally stakeholders behind common missions and set ambitious, cross-sectoral innovation challenges (Escobar, 2018; Geels & Schot, 2007).
However, the obstacles and complexities in orchestrating genuinely participatory and democratic approaches to mission-oriented innovation are formidable, from overcoming entrenched institutional silos and vested interests to sustaining political and public support over the long time horizons required for transformative change. Let alone the massive cultural and institutional transformation required in social and economic governance and policymaking so that people and communities can be meaningfully engaged as co-creators of their futures.
By interrogating and deconstructing the uneven power relations, hegemonic ideologies, and reductive paradigms that shape mainstream economic thinking and policy, critical design can help denaturalise the dysfunctional status quo and create space for more pluralistic, participatory, and emancipatory approaches to social and economic transformation. This may help to steer mission-oriented innovation away from the depoliticised techno-solutionism that has often characterised past efforts towards a more holistic, evolutionary approach attuned to the social and ecological realities of particular contexts.
Designing economies for collective well-being demands a pluralistic landscape of experiments contoured to diverse needs, aspirations, and struggles—one that contends with uncertainty, conflicting values, and uneven vulnerabilities.
Cultivating critical design capabilities and heterodox economic literacy among policymakers, activists, and frontline communities might democratise the tools of social and economic system change and enable more diverse coalitions to challenge elite power structures and co-create alternative futures.
By synthesising insights from evolutionary, ecological, and complexity economics alongside critical and strategic design, this paper explores how heterodox theory might be translated into multi-layered interventions to reshape political economies around collective well-being, drawing on examples from my work in humanitarian and social innovation.
From reimagining money and property rights to cultivating regenerative cultures and infrastructures, it highlights the broad scope for mobilising strategic design and collective action to reclaim social and economic governance for the common good.
The entanglement of mainstream economics and traditional design
The historical entanglement of mainstream economic ideas and traditional design practices has profoundly shaped design's capacity to foster sustainable and equitable modes of development. The design industry has largely internalised a reductive and ahistorical conception of human needs, an assumption of limitless natural resources, and a disregard for the negative externalities of production and consumption—all of which can be traced to the influence of neoclassical and neoliberal economics.
This entanglement is epitomised by the figure of the 'homo economicus'—the rational, self-interested, utility-maximising agent at the heart of mainstream economic models. Despite robust critiques from the likes of Amartya Sen and Ha-Joon Chang, this conception of human nature has permeated design discourse and practice, from the modernist visions of Gropius and Teague to the user-centred design methodologies of today. In the process, it has naturalised a narrow, consumption-oriented view of human flourishing while obscuring the diverse cultural, social, and political factors that shape our needs and desires.
Similarly, the dismissal of limits to natural resource by influential economists like Jean-Baptiste Say is expressed in design's embrace of planned obsolescence and creative waste. From the persuasive design tactics of Christine Frederick to the disposable material culture of the present day, the design industry has often treated the Earth's bounty as an infinite input to fuel endless economic growth—with catastrophic consequences for ecosystems and communities around the world.
Similarly, the persuasive design tactics promoted by Christine Frederick in the early 20th century, such as "creative waste" and "progressive obsolescence," encouraged the rapid consumption and disposal of goods as a positive force for economic growth, regardless of the ecological consequences. Frederick argued that there was no reason why "inexhaustibly replenishable" materials should not be "creatively wasted," normalising the idea that the planets matter was an infinite input to fuel endless economic growth. This dismissal of limits to natural resource mirrors those of economists like Jean-Baptiste Say. Together with the dominant attitudes in mainstream economics then and now, Frederick tactics helped foster a high consumption culture until the present day with catastrophic consequences for ecosystems and communities around the world.
Finally, the exclusion of pollution and other negative externalities from economic accounting has enabled design to focus myopically on enhancing the form and function of products and services while ignoring their far-reaching social and ecological impacts. Despite the emergence of ecodesign and sustainable design frameworks in recent decades, the industry as a whole has failed to reckon with the vast waste streams and carbon emissions generated by its activities.
These dynamics are not merely a matter of individual designers' choices or values, they are deeply inscribed in the incentive structures, business models, and institutional arrangements that govern the design industry—from the short-term horizons of shareholder capitalism to the siloed nature of academic and professional training.
Introducing strategic design
Unlike 'traditional' design, which is narrowly focused on enhancing the form and function of products and services, strategic design takes a wider view, moving freely between matter and meta—the artefacts, services and infrastructures that constitute lived experience and the paradigms, power relations and incentive structures that shape societal evolution (Hill, 2012). Crucially, strategic design is embedded within the dark matter of socio-technical systems—the cultures, incentives and power relations that shape the realm of the possible yet remain largely illegible to traditional policy tools (Hill, 2012).
The UnBlocked Cash pilot in Vanuatu demonstrated many of these qualities as a small team within Oxfam Australia—of which I was a part—aimed to reimagine post-disaster economic recovery through a distributed ledger technology-based platform embedded within the communities. Here, the NFC card, mobile app, and website become MacGuffins to drive the plot and Trojan Horses carrying multiple transformative agendas—from shifting attitudes around cash assistance and prototyping new international funds flows to challenging the moratorium on the individual use of cryptocurrencies in Vanuatu. Meanwhile, the rapid development of the 'Super Vendor' model in response to challenges with vendor liquidity showcased how strategic design enables agile responses to emergent issues, facilitating experimentation with alternative economic arrangements.
Drawing from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, we see how, during the pilot, 'fast layers' of community engagement and digital prototyping interact with slower-moving reform of how funds flow through Oxfam's confederacy and through incumbent financial services—not a linear delivery process but a generative interplay between situated intervention and systemic rewiring.
However, the true goal is to steer economic evolution at a civilisational scale—whether building resilience in the Nordic model or transitioning to regenerative post-growth economies. Here, the link between matter and meta becomes an existential imperative—harnessing the power of the entrepreneurial state to make long-term, mission-oriented investments while propagating new social and cultural logic through the performative power of experiments (Mazzucato & Dibb, 2019; Escobar, 2018).
At this scale strategic design offers methodologies for repurposing the "complex, opaque machinery" of governance towards a more participatory, experimental and learning-oriented modus operandi (Latour, 2005).
On a good day, the Design and Technology practice within Nesta—where I serve as a Design Lead—integrates analysis, co-creation and stewardship to translate strategic intent into tangible proofs of concept—whether reimagining early years education to embrace diversity, influencing the UK's food environment to improve public health outcomes or steering homeowners towards heat pumps. Here, each of Nesta's experiments becomes a platform for learning and, ideally, replication across the UK by demonstrating public support and providing the evidence base to inform new policy design.
Strategic design thus becomes a form of 'cultural invention' (Hill, 2012), oriented towards the 'ontological reframing' of capitalocentric development models (Escobar, 2020). By envisioning alternative trajectories, it expands the field of political contestation—not just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic but fundamentally redesigning the ship (Fry, 2017).
However, most days, despite the potential described, designers are simply tasked with rearranging the deckchairs, or as Dan Hill (2012) puts it, worrying about the shade of lipstick to apply on the pig. Redesigning the ship may require new hybrid capacities at the intersection of statecraft, political activism, and world-making—to hold space for productive agonism while building coalitions for transformation (Mouffe, 2013).
Mission-oriented innovation
Rather than optimising narrowly for efficiency or technological progress in isolation, mission-oriented innovation cuts across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries to transform systems as a whole—harnessing the directionality of policy, the dynamism of civil society, and the creativity of business to solve pressing societal challenges (Mazzucato & McPherson, 2018).
Historical examples range from the Apollo Program to the Sustainable Development Goals—mobilising public and private actors around a common vision for technological and social progress (Mazzucato, 2021).
Meanwhile, Nesta's health innovation partnership with Asda demonstrates how an ambitious challenge—in this case, making healthier food more accessible, affordable, and attractive—can catalyse cross-sectoral collaboration and experimentation.
Crucially, missions do not engage in top-down planning or 'picking winners'. Instead, they set the direction of growth, tilt the playing field, and dynamically 'crowd in' bottom-up solutions through strategic public sector leadership and investment (UCL IIPP, 2021).
Examples like the Danish wind energy sector and the German Energiewende illustrate how proactive state investment and goal-setting can foster decentralised experimentation and participation while transforming technological trajectories (Kanger et al., 2020; Mazzucato, 2015).
Missions—like that in which the health innovation partnership sits—provide a framework for collaboration and experimentation across sectors, scales, and timeframes.
Beyond Nesta, they leverage the entire arsenal of economic policy instruments, from procurement and prize schemes to patent systems and prudential regulation, to shape the risk-reward structures and institutional frameworks governing economic activity (Kattel et al., 2018; Colebrook, 2021). In doing so, they open up the 'possibility space' for new forms of social value creation—catalysing the development of alternative institutions, infrastructures, and imaginaries (OECD, 2021).
Mission-oriented innovation enables a fundamental reframing of the role of the state and other public actors in the economy—from "market fixing" and de-risking to actively co-creating markets in line with collectively defined goals (Mazzucato, 2015).
At the level of an NGO like Nesta, mission-oriented innovation applied in tandem with strategic design practices helps to co-create market segments. For the health innovation partnership, strategic design helps to align commercial imperatives with the public health goals set by the mission. By collaborating with Asda to develop a health strategy and identify design, as well as test interventions that promote healthier diets while maintaining profitability, Nesta demonstrates how strategic design can steer business practices towards collective well-being.
Realising the potential of strategic design and mission-oriented innovation
To challenge the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm, grounded in reductive, mechanistic models of human behaviour and social change (Arthur, 2021; Hickel, 2020), we must develop new economic imaginaries and actionable pathways to bring them into being (Escobar, 2020). A task that likely requires a multifaceted approach combining a critical analysis of the prevailing paradigm with creative experimentation and coalition-building to foster alternative trajectories.
Strategic design, with its capacity to bridge theory and practice, matter and meta, offers one set of tools to begin translating heterodox economic insights into contextually grounded interventions to reshape the evolutionary dynamics of contemporary capitalism that shape our social fabric. By harnessing the directionality of mission-oriented innovation and the potential of emerging critical design practices, it may be possible to open up spaces for communal aspirations and courageous exploration of a political economy centred on collective well-being.
This transformation will likely call for an evolutionary, experimental, and participatory approach to social and economic change, attuned to real-world complexity and emergent dynamics. A cultivating of new mindsets and sensibilities among policymakers, moving beyond the false certainties of computable general equilibrium models to grapple with the radical uncertainty and conflictual values at the heart of economic life. And institutional innovations that enable a more agile, anticipatory, and adaptive modes of governance, along with investments in participatory design approaches and citizen science to harness the collective intelligence of communities.
For the design and innovation community, this transformation may demand a greater degree of humility—recognising the limits and undesirable qualities of expert knowledge and working to democratise the tools and practices of systems change. As Tony Fry (2010) argues, strategic design must be understood not as a value-neutral problem-solving methodology but rather as a world-making practice—one that actively shapes and is shaped by the uneven power relations and cultural imaginaries of the societies in which it intervenes. Designers and innovators thus have a responsibility to critically examine their positionality and complicity in perpetuating unsustainable and inequitable modes of development—and to work in solidarity with social movements and frontline communities to transform them.
The UnBlocked Cash pilot reaffirmed the centrality of community engagement, staff training, and technological translation to realising the promise of strategic design in economic transformation. It highlighted the need to grapple with epistemic and power differentials, centre diverse ways of knowing and being, and build situated capabilities for systems change.
Design's humanist roots offer a powerful culture of care and creativity in the service of better human systems—qualities desperately required to navigate the great transitions of our time (Margolin & Margolin, 2002). Meanwhile, heterodox economics' pluralistic empiricism provides a deeper, richer understanding of the ethical, cultural, and political embeddedness of economic life—and myriad pathways to reconstruct it. By combining a mission-driven, challenge-led approach of with these two ways of knowing, it may be possible to mobilise collective agency to reshape the evolutionary dynamics of contemporary capitalism and begin building an economy in service of collective well-being and ecological resilience.
As Arturo Escobar (2018) reminds us, the transition to a more caring, just, and sustainable world will be a pluriverse, not a universe—evolving in contextually grounded ways that reflect the particularities of place and culture. The call is to design with, not for—at once critically and creatively, with humility, care, and imagination.
Conclusion
If we are to realise the potential of strategic design and mission-oriented innovation to reshape our social and economic systems, we must grapple with the inevitable "messiness" of agonistic democracy—designing with, not for, in a spirit of critical pragmatism and radical incrementalism (Escobar, 2018).
Our task as citizen, designers and innovators is to connect experiments like those described in this paper to the levers of power—to mobilise public institutions and collective resources in service of a political economy centred collective well-being. Here, strategic design may become a vital tool for building a world where many worlds fit—through the patient, humble and hopeful work of civilisational redesign. This is a process of changing the world by dispersing and democratising agency without seizing power (Holloway, 2010).
In this sense, the true value of strategic design does not lie in its technical capacity but in its moral and political imagination. Its methods may provide the template for productive struggle and participatory experimentation within institutional innovations, promoting a plurality of economic paradigms and lifeways.
But to mobilise this capability the design and innovation community build unlikely alliances to confront incumbents and weaving together complementary strategies for culture shift and narrative change. Presently only small pockets of the community have the audacity to think at this scale and remain complicit in the view that design is only concerned with matter.