The three posters present a design-research project investigating how “strategic things” are understood, interpreted, and materially enacted by designers in educational contexts. Triggered by collaboration with the Institut für strategische Dinge Berlin, the study involved 24 participants from BA and MA programs and used an open, qualitative survey method to capture individual associations, working practices, and conceptual framings. The research process—visualized in detail on page 1—combined briefing, definition of the research focus, iterative questionnaire design, documentation, and visual analysis, culminating in large-scale diagrams that cluster designers’ responses around phases of practice, sources of inspiration, and modes of reasoning .

Across pages 2 and 3, the results map “strategic things” onto a broad ecology of design activity: research and analysis, material experimentation, prototyping, project management, communication, intuition, and speculative thinking all emerge as central structuring forces. Participants described strategic elements not only as tools or methods—such as sketches, CAD software, mood boards, or budgets—but also as cognitive and affective drivers like motivation, uncertainty, ambition, and ethical orientation. The posters visualize these insights through dense network diagrams and categorical fields that connect processes, media, collaborators, environments, and decision-making logics.

Overall, the project argues that “strategic things” remain deliberately open and plural, functioning less as a fixed category than as a flexible conceptual lens for understanding how designers navigate complexity. The study concludes that this interpretive openness is productive: it enables experimentation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and new forms of reflective practice, while pointing toward future research that could deepen the analysis through comparative case studies and closer observation of how such “things” shape concrete design outcomes in professional settings .