There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"A great design strategist (...) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what's going on around them and they're good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book "Accelerando", describes the profession of a "meme broker" and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity "scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy. (...) The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed."

Why do I blog this? some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.