Frictional strategies: Diplomacy, idiot, and the politics of care in contemporary strategic design

This article repositions strategic design as a relational and situated practice that works with dissensus rather than subordinating it to efficiency or problem-solving. Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ figures of the diplomat and the idiot, we conceptualize strategic design as a practice of composition and symbolic modulation that keeps disagreement public and workable without collapsing it into consensus. We develop this argument through two contrasting practice-based cases. Church of Entrepreneurship is a performative, parodic intervention that saturates entrepreneurial discourse. VentilaDor is a situated digital intervention that mobilizes anonymity, circulation, and harm-reduction ethics to make otherwise unspeakable institutional tensions publicly readable. Read together, the cases show how friction can be strategically sustained across different media and infrastructures of participation. The article contributes a more precise vocabulary for analysing agonistic composition, symbolic modulation, and care as political and relational resources for strategic design under conditions of plurality and uncertainty.