At my web shop we have been studying Content Strategy to implement it and raise the business value of our web development service/product. Upon modelling our business process I stumbled upon what seems to be the parallel equivalent of CS: Design Strategy.
Now, we've been able to understand CS thanks to Colleen Jones' "Clout" and Christina Halvorson's "Content Strategy for The Web", so I'm wondering if there are any prominent books/ultimate-references for Design Strategy.
Judging from the examples on the Wikipedia pages, it appears that Design Strategy may well be just a new term for product/brand development, and Content Strategy a new term for the editorial process.
And in fact the Design Strategy page could do with some serious "content strategy" applied:
.. interplay between design and business strategy, forming a systematic approach integrating holistic-thinking, research methods used to inform business strategy and strategic planning which provides a context for design...
Translating insights into actionable solutions ...
Continuing on my "nothing new under the sun" theme, for initial inspiration I'd recommend looking up Raymond Loewy (Wikipedia), the prolific industrial designer who managed to both cover everything from graphics to locomotives and popularised the whiole idea of products being designed at all:
Shell and former BP logos, the Greyhound bus, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 and S-1 locomotives, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery.
