On Design as Strategy: Reading Xènia Viladás

I came to Diseño Rentable from an unusual direction. My background is in industrial and product design — I spent years designing physical objects, furniture, lighting — before moving into institutional communication and cultural strategy. By the time I read Viladás, I had already made the transition. But the book gave me language for something I had been doing intuitively without fully understanding why it worked.

In one sentence, her central argument is this: design stops being about making things look good the moment it integrates into how an organisation actually makes decisions. At that point it becomes something else entirely — a tool for identifying value, generating it, and communicating it.

That is, for me, the core of the book.

The design ladder — and why it matters for consultants

One of the most practically useful ideas in Diseño Rentable is the Design Ladder: a framework for understanding the different levels at which an organisation can use design, from pure styling at the bottom to strategic integration at the top.

Most organisations think they are higher on the ladder than they are.

A company that calls a designer after all the key decisions have already been made is using design at its most limited — as decoration on top of a system someone else built. A company that uses design to detect opportunities, define products and orient strategy is doing something fundamentally different.

The practical consequence for a consultant is significant. The question should not be: what does this organisation need to design? It should be: what level of design maturity does this organisation currently operate at, and what level does it actually need? Those are different diagnoses, and they lead to different interventions.

Design starts before the pencil

The second idea I keep returning to is deceptively simple: design starts before designing.

Viladás proposes a sequence — identify value, confer value, communicate value — that positions the designer not as someone who materialises solutions but as someone who helps discover what is worth solving in the first place. If the client arrives with the solution already decided, your first contribution might be questioning whether it is the right problem.

The brief as a strategic tool is part of this. Viladás treats the brief not as a document telling the designer what to do, but as a mechanism for forcing clarity before anyone touches anything: what problem do we have, why do we have it, for whom, what does success look like, what are the constraints? A good brief, in this reading, is one of the most valuable things a consultant can deliver — it forces the client to think before acting.

On measuring design — and where the book shows its age

The most honest chapter in the book is the one on evaluation. Viladás acknowledges that measuring the economic impact of design is genuinely hard — and she is right to distinguish between ROI (return on investment) and ROE (return on expectations). The second question — did we achieve what we set out to achieve? — often matters more than the first, especially in branding, communication and strategy, where the economic impact may be indirect or arrive long after the work is done.

Here, however, is where I would push back slightly on the book.

Published in 2008, Diseño Rentable predates much of the contemporary conversation about design thinking, service design and systemic innovation. Some of its ideas have aged well. Others have become so absorbed into mainstream management that they feel obvious now — not because they are wrong, but because they won.

And the core claim — design is profitable — I would reframe. Not because it is false, but because it is incomplete. Design can generate value. But demonstrating that it does requires connecting a chain: design → decision → behaviour → result. Without that chain, you have an argument. With it, you have evidence.

That is a much more demanding standard. And it is, I think, the right one.

What I learned from this book

These are the five ideas that have genuinely stayed with me — the ones that changed something in how I approach my own practice.

Diseño Rentable is not a perfect book, and Viladás would probably be the first to say so. But it remains one of the clearest articulations I have encountered of why design thinking and strategic management belong in the same conversation — and why the separation between them has cost organisations more than they realise.

For anyone navigating that intersection, it is still worth reading.