Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DESIGN (Design Thinking in Defence Organisations: The Promises and Dangers of Intellectual Emancipation in the Management of Violence)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2019-08-01 do 2021-07-31
With design, military officers seek to fundamentally shift their perspective over an issue for transitioning to a more holistic perspective opening up new pathways to address this issue. Design implies both sense-making over an unknown, complex or ambiguous issue as well as the art and science of novelty for addressing this issue. This research is particularly important as design is applied by military officers including some in senior leadership positions. Design is shaping the management of violence in the planning of operations and there is a lack of literature documenting its transformational impacts across NATO members and partners and in the countries officers intervene. This project sought to fill this gap by developing a sociologically informed analysis of design in four selected case studies: Danish, Swedish, Polish and French Armed Forces. This approach, and the knowledge generated from it, are contributing to guidance for better design practices including in professional military education through dissemination and teaching. In conclusion, the research identified key conditions making designerly ways of thinking possible such as crisis contexts, a lack of ressources and open-mindedness to diverse views to name a few. The research observed a strong counter-intuitive relationship between armed forces that are more doctrine-informed such as Swedish Armed Forces and those that are less doctrine informed such as Danish Armed Forces. The most doctrine-informed organisations are generally more receptive to design since their organization tend to follow doctrinal trends in the United States including the development of design doctrine since the mid-2000s. However, the less doctrine-informed organisations tend to have a greater range of individual using design with an educational background often from the United Sates.
The work conducted included three work packages. The first work package included training and networking activities to make the action possible including a course in Design at the Danish Technical University . The work package no 2 involved ethnographic research and interviews of senior officers using or learning design across Denmark, Sweden, Poland and France. The third work package focused on dissemination activities including scientific dissemination. The most notable and innovative result remain the exploitation of the research findings to create a serious game. This serious game aimed at reproducing the same conditions of possibility making designerly ways of thinking possible. Thanks to this game, we can observe how officers think to suggest better design and planning practices. This third work package included also the preparation of a book based on the action and scientific articles.
While the literature contained more or less rigorous historical accounts of the transnational diffusion of design across NATO members and partners, a more comprehensive sociologically informed analysis based on ethnographic methods was missing. This project filled this gap by offering a new understanding of the role of knowledge in shaping perceptions and behavior over the management of violence including the unexpected use of creative and critical methods inspired by design theory. We can already anticipate a significant societal impact of the research as several military colleges across NATO members and partners are including results in the form of articles and the serious game to their curriculum such as at Canadian Forces College, the Swedish Defence University, the Royal Danish Defence College, the Ecole de Guerre and the Norwegian Defence University to name a few. The website including access to a repository of articles and videos on design in the military is visited by 500 to 1000 people per month. Overall, the action is having direct and indirect impact on policy-making by exposing senior defence and security policy-makers to a radically different ways of thinking to understand issues and generate approaches to address them.