Dan Hill: What It’s Like to be the Director of Strategic Design for a Country (Sweden!)

Dan Hill has one of the most exciting design jobs in the world. Image courtesy of Dan Hill.

Helping develop a fossil free mobility system for an entire country would be the project of a lifetime for most of us. For Dan Hill, it’s just another workday (albeit a pretty exciting one). 

As the Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency, Hill spends his days thinking about the most pressing questions the country needs to answer so they are fit for the future. Big rock questions include, How do we design spaces to increase social fabric? How might we use our school food system to reinvent farming? How do we create an environment that generates public health? 

Hill’s role is pretty unique — there is no real equivalent in the United States and not every country has a role like this. (“The UK has an innovation agency, but it’s not really design-led; Finland kind of has one.”) Sitting under Sweden’s Ministry of Business, Industry, and Innovation, Vinnova ensures that the country’s citizens and communities are capable of facing and shaping their future through partnerships between industry, the public sector, and society.

Here, Hill shares how he applies design principles to the role of government; how exactly his role works; and why he is rethinking ideas as big and unexpected as school lunch in Sweden.

Tell us about your role as the Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova and how it is unique, even within the design world. 

On the commercial, client-facing side of design, as a designer you usually respond to a brief. By the time you get the brief, however, the client has defined what they need and often specified not only the size and scope of the project, but many of its details. You can try to bend the project in different directions, if they seem fruitful, but this takes a ton of work downstream of the brief to do that. At Vinnova, our focus is heading upstream. If the answer is to design a library or car or something else, what is the question? What is a library? Or a car, for that matter? I work to figure out these ‘stage minus one’ questions we’re looking to answer, to design the brief, and help frame better questions.

How do you approach your work?

My job is dragging these big questions, these systemic challenges, down to the ground and trying to make them as tangible as possible. We can then figure out what and who we bring together in order to approach the challenge, as well as what form the work might take. 

Traditionally, Vinnova’s role has focused on funding research and innovation projects. What I’ve been doing is saying, Okay, some of the answer probably requires new funding, but some of it might just be doing things differently, using existing investments or capabilities. Maybe you have the funding, but you need to change a policy, or law, in order to unlock new outcomes. You don’t necessarily need funding for that, but you do need both political buy-in and citizens on-board for that to be legitimate. It’s a difficult challenge, but not necessarily an expensive one.

What are the big questions that Sweden is trying to answer these days? 

Sweden has about 10 million people, so it's a relatively small population. But it’s a really large country geographically — one of the biggest in Europe — covered with lakes and forests. (Like a big Michigan without Detroit!) Historically, the population has been relatively homogenous, but now it’s diversifying. So how do we best absorb immigration, and become increasingly inclusive, while using this diversity to tackle big questions like the climate crisis or public health?

We’ve done transformation before. Up until about 1900, Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe and within one or two generations, they just pressed their foot on the gas and accelerated to become one of the wealthiest. The transition was built upon the idea of the Nordic model — a welfare state where you pay a good amount of taxes; have a strongly positive social contract, including good collaboration between government, workers and industry; and develop high quality public services, like good free education and healthcare, as well as excellent transportation, buildings, and shared public amenities, like playgrounds, parks and libraries. It was a huge collective transformation. As industry grew, companies like Volvo, IKEA, and H&M became major players globally. Now we have new waves, like Mojang, Dice, Spotify, and Klarna launched here. 

This simple but powerful welfare model worked in the 20th century, but now we recognize that it doesn’t work when it comes to the 21st century. We now know we have lots of issues, like social justice or environmental degradation, that we’re trying to figure out. Sweden has a proud history here too, as a leader in equality, but we still have a long, long way to go. How do you retain that strong social contract that is the core of the country, in which everyone benefits together, but do that in a way that recognizes that not everybody who lives in Sweden today has family here that dates back 300 years? It means you can no longer assume what your neighbor is like, but instead you have to build new kinds of participation and inclusion, around diversity. A spirit of participation was present in the early ideals of the Nordic model, framed around workers’ rights and social justice concerns, but we need a different and increased emphasis on this today and tomorrow.

The teams I work with try to solve for questions like these. It means not just addressing the technical questions, like how do we keep people warm and fed, or the traffic flowing, or the lights on, but looking at it on the relational level. We need a better understanding of the diversity of cultures, of people as part of nature, and of a richer, more complex idea of the environment — such that Sweden can thrive in multiple dimensions. 

What’s your framework for approaching these big questions? 

We take a design-led approach, drawing from some core practices like integration, synthesis, prototyping, and stewardship. Integration is bringing together different people and perspectives from all angles, which must be present in the conversation at the earliest stage and ongoing. This means we can collectively explore possibilities from multiple different angles. 

Synthesis is ‘coming up with something’ i.e. invention, based on analysis, and the insights from discussions and experiments: What should we do? What do we need to design here? 

Analysis is ‘what’s happening’? 

Prototyping is building out a model to test before you make the real thing — but ideally in public, and often as a real thing! Just not yet at scale, so that you can try things out and learn from them before fully committing.  

Finally, the practice of stewardship, which is making sure the thing happens with the integrity of the vision, whilst also learning and adapting to conditions as they change. It means staying on board, rather than ‘fire-and-forget.’ We’re trying to bring these design practices and cultures into government, and the public sector.

You’re taking on some unexpected initiatives, like rethinking school food in Sweden. What’s the upstream question there and how do you view it as a design challenge?

This one revolves around a big question in Sweden: How do we create a healthy, sustainable food system? We brought together people who are running food systems, farmers, and manufacturers. One of several powerful intervention points that came from those workshops was that we need to rethink school food. That is so important because every kid in Sweden gets free school food — that’s about two million meals a day. Outside of the home that’s almost half of all meals served in Sweden every day (the other half being in cafes and restaurants). So it’s a very powerful lever that we could pull, as it’s regulated by the state and delivered through the public sector at the municipal level, and yet has lots of private sector and community actors on the end of it — as well as the environment.

Is school food in Sweden good? 

Good-ish! It’s an enormous system, so the food can sometimes be a bit generic. Because of the size of the system, and previous approaches to procurement, the focus has tended to be on efficiency and cost. We looked at it and asked, Can we still serve the number of meals each day and make them more than just nutritious and safe? 

Once we got into this, we realized it was about more than the food. We needed to redesign school “restaurants” so they don’t look so scary or unwelcoming. The kitchens had often been designed along rational or reductive lines like How do we keep the food safe? While that’s a good question, and one we have to achieve, it’s obviously not the only question asked in kitchens. Is there another way to build them that can achieve multiple outcomes? 

We came up with the idea to have a distributed set of prototypes, where local municipalities and the schools they run can invent and get creative around their kitchen designs, their menus, the way that food is served, how lessons are taught involving food, where the food comes from, and so on. These would all work to refine a set of principles around food that had emerged from a large consultation process with schools, farms, science centers, students, businesses, and municipalities. We’re trying this approach out in four cities now and, as we learn from each, we can start to scale this across the entire school system. 

One school is looking to replace some of its long lunch tables with a more comfortable, almost restaurant-like environment: different lighting, softer furnishings, different zones, and so on. Another is working with a local greenhouse and science center, getting students help with food production and understanding where it comes from. Another is seeing if they can bring the students in to cook with the school chefs, designing menus with a more adventurous choice of foods. Another is using the school grounds for a new market at the weekends. And so on.

In Sweden, the system is often very good at the rational, effective, engineering side of how to deal with known qualities. But we also have increasingly diverse sets of communities and cultures, as well as complex challenges. That’s where we, as designers, can help put these more complex, ambiguous qualities onto the table at the same time.

Between working on mega projects that take years and navigating government bureaucracy, you must have a lot of patience. 

Patience, yes — and stubbornness and tenacity! On the commercial side of design, you can often do something very quickly, working across 10 projects simultaneously. But you can’t really get into the guts of the system — into what I call the ‘dark matter.’ It’s upstream of where you are, or it may not even be appropriate for your role to get stuck into the way the governance works, unless the positioning and core rights are very clearly articulated. At Vinnova, you do have to have patience, yes, as you are conjuring these projects out of the Earth, sometimes, and holding it up in the light and asking everyone to see their everyday systems — and the assumptions baked into them — in a new way. That’s not easy! But it is hugely rewarding when we see that such systems can begin to change.

I also teach at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and UCL, and so I try to get students at earlier stages of their careers to think about this type of work — whether they’re designers or not. We need more designers coming through, motivated by the big questions our communities need to answer, and as designers, we also need clients and collaborators who are aware of the potential (and pitfalls and limits) of working with designers on these systemic challenges. I’m very hopeful about those possibilities, however, which helps create the patience, I guess!

If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.