Being Here, Now.

Design Anthropology begins from a simple assertion shared by scholars such as Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Anne Marie Kristensen: design is not only the creation of things but the shaping of human futures. It is a cultural process, a way communities collectively imagine possibilities, negotiate meanings, and embed their values into systems that guide life. Tim Ingold adds that design is always “a practice of correspondence,” a continual dialogue between people, their environment, and their aspirations.

When I look at how Ateneo de Davao University journeyed toward its next strategic horizon under the leadership of University President Fr. Karel S. San Juan, SJ, I see not a technical planning exercise but a full design-anthropological process unfolding inside a Jesuit university. The year-long discernment embodied the slow, communal, iterative nature of cultural design, a process shaped by dialogue, identity, experience, and the synodal practice of walking together. The University did not write a plan, it designed a future grounded in who we are.

It is within this cultural and spiritual framing that Fortiores 2030 emerges. Fortiores is drawn from the Latin root meaning “stronger,” inspired by the University motto Fortes in Fide — “strong in faith”. This shift from fortes to fortiores signals a movement: from being strong in faith to becoming stronger in purpose, clarity, resilience, and impact as a university community. It conveys that the next five years are not simply about maintaining strength but growing in it, in ways aligned with our identity, mission, and the contemporary demands of Mindanao and the world.

The strategic planning journey began long before the final document took form. The University entered the first phases of planning in mid-2024, beginning with “Planning to Plan” and the evaluation of the outgoing 1A1P Strategic Plan. In Design Anthropology, this early stage corresponds to “prefiguration,” the period when a community senses that its existing structures no longer fully serve its lived realities. Faculty, staff, administrators, and units raised concerns about instruction, digital transformation, research integration, administrative systems, community work, and partnership networks. These observations, scattered across conversations and reflections, were not yet proposals. They were signals that the University needed to redesign its orientation for the next five years.

This realization expanded into a collective encounter during the Institutional Strategic Conversations on 22 August 2024. In design-anthropological practice, participatory meaning-making begins with listening to lived experience. The conversations that day, involving hundreds of faculty, personnel, and student representatives, were not mere consultations. They resembled ethnographic co-creation: small groups shared stories, mapped concerns, identified patterns, and articulated tacit values. Documenters captured these insights, which were later synthesized. What struck me was how deeply spiritual the listening became. The synodal act of “walking together” aligned seamlessly with the design-anthropological emphasis on co-creation grounded in real human experiences.

The strategic-planning conferences in January and February 2025 deepened this process. In their works, Gunn and Otto describe the “iterative negotiation” at the heart of Design Anthropology — cycles of proposing, listening, synthesizing, and revising. The conferences used the Jesuit method of spiritual conversation, which mirrored these cycles almost perfectly. Participants listened without debate, reflected collectively, and let themes emerge organically. Through this process, the University identified recurring emphases: digital transformation, integration of teaching–research–community engagement, leadership formation, strengthened partnerships, and the enduring commitment to peace and development in Mindanao.

Instead of imposing priorities, the community discovered them: structures emerging from interactions, not from prescriptions.

The next stage, the collation and consolidation of insights before approval and formal commencement, was a moment of translation. In Design Anthropology, translation is the phase when cultural insights are shaped into coherent frameworks. The planning team took the year’s worth of input and expressed it in the plan’s core statements: Identity, Vision, Mission, Values, Commitments, and Initiatives. The Identity statement — “A Catholic, Jesuit, and Filipino University” committed to Mindanao — anchored the entire design in a cultural worldview. The Vision imagined a world of global citizens working for peace, justice, democracy, and sustainable development, with a Mindanao thriving in its cultural and faith diversity. The Mission emphasized academic excellence, robust research, community engagement, and the formation of discerning leaders distinguished by character and commitment to the common good. Together, these statements did not merely describe organizational direction, they expressed the University’s cultural identity, which we can identify as the deepest substrate of any design process.

The Seven Values — the seven “Curas” — further reveal the cultural logic of Fortiores 2030. Cura Personalis, Cura Communitatis, Cura Societatis, Cura Naturae, Cura Apostolicae, Cura Ecclesiae, and Cura Missionis Societatis Iesu form an integrated vision of care: care for persons, community, society, the environment, the apostolate, the Church, and the global Jesuit mission. These values shaped the entire design process, infusing it with a spirituality of stewardship, solidarity, and service. The plan’s diagrams show how values flow naturally into commitments and initiatives, reinforcing the anthropological insight that design is not separate from identity; it is its expression.

By the time the seven strategic commitments of Fortiores 2030 took shape, they carried the authority of collective discernment. Producing discerning and adaptive leaders, engaging communities as prophetic leaders and citizens, deepening digital innovation, integrating teaching–research–community engagement, strengthening local and international partnerships, enhancing work in peace and development, and institutionalizing synodal and spiritual processes — these commitments were born from cultural, not technical, logic. They reflected the patterns of meaning discovered through the University’s year-long listening.

The shift into operational planning showed how design becomes embodied. Units translated commitments into initiatives, programs, and measurable indicators such as the satisfaction rating for services and the requirement that half the community participate in dialogues on social justice issues. Even automation and financial sustainability were framed in terms of mission and identity. This aligns with Ingold’s idea that design is always relational: systems must correspond to the life of the community they serve.

Fortiores 2030 thus emerges not only as a plan but as a design, a cultural, spiritual, and institutional design that responds to who the University is and where it is located. This quality makes it a compelling framework for strategic planning in Jesuit higher education more broadly. Many Jesuit universities grapple with translating the Universal Apostolic Preferences into operational strategies that are both faithful to charism and responsive to context. What Ateneo de Davao demonstrates is that planning becomes authentically Jesuit when identity becomes the point of departure, not the final decoration. The plan’s structure, beginning with identity, vision, mission, and values, and only then moving toward strategic commitments and initiatives, reflects Ignatian pedagogy’s pattern of experience, reflection, and action. Other institutions can adapt this method by beginning with deep listening to context, engaging in communal discernment, and designing strategy from the cultural and spiritual ground of their institutional life.

Fortiores 2030 also offers a distinctive contribution to global Jesuit education because of its deliberate contextualization of mission in Mindanao. The plan does not treat Mindanao as a backdrop but as a locus of mission. The commitment to “Deepen Our Work in Peace and Development of Mindanao” unites BARMM engagement, Indigenous Peoples’ concerns, interfaith dialogue, local governance, socio-economic development, cultural resilience, and environmental protection into a coherent strategic horizon. It demonstrates that for Jesuit universities, mission is not generic; it emerges from and responds to local histories, cultures, and social conditions. For Ateneo de Davao, this means embracing Mindanao’s challenges and possibilities as central to its identity and direction.

Seen through Design Anthropology, this contextualization is a powerful act of cultural design. Mindanao’s stories, conflicts, aspirations, and communities become part of the University’s strategic imagination. Mission is not applied to context but drawn from it. Fortiores 2030 thus shows how Jesuit universities can become deeply rooted in their places: discerning what God is doing in a particular region, listening to the cries and hopes of its people, and designing institutional commitment from that discernment.

Looking back, I see Fortiores 2030 now as more than just a roadmap. I see it as a profound example of how a university can engage in design as a cultural, spiritual, and synodal act. The planning process mirrors the best of Design Anthropology: a commitment to lived experience, an insistence on communal meaning-making, and an understanding that design is always relational and value-driven. It also reflects the heart of Ignatian and synodal spirituality, of listening deeply, discerning collectively, and acting with clarity and purpose.

Accompanying this process allowed me to witness how Fortiores 2030 became a co-designed future, rooted in our institutional identity, shaped by our values, and sustained by a community walking together in faith and mission. It stands today as the living result of what a university can build when it listens to itself with sincerity, draws from its cultural roots, and commits to designing its next chapter with courage and hope.