Designing in Complex Security Contexts: Enabling Frame Awareness through Sharks, Dollar Signs, and Police Badges

Over the last decade, the emergence of military design theorists, educators, and practitioners has coagulated into a community of practice internationally and across multiple armed forces. This new group of military academics and professionals demonstrates a keen interest in developing and expanding the notion of “designing for war.” For military design theory, there are unexpected design contributions from postmodern philosophy, non-Western concepts, and other highly subjective and alternative fields and practices that provide insight and novel thought for human opportunities within the dynamic and complex conflict contexts of the 21st century. Many of these novel constructs are not available in mainstream commercial design applications, methods, or theory—they were developed for military design contexts and are largely unknown outside of the community of practice for security contexts. Part of this lack of exposure is inevitable, given the classification requirements of many design efforts. This article presents one of the most popular military design techniques used by the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), a military education platform in Tampa, Florida. JSOU is part of the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and provides tailored education to Special Operations Forces (SOF) worldwide.