The value of designers' creative practice within complex collaborations

TLDR

This case study investigates how designers’ creative practice adds value in complex academic‑industrial collaborations by shifting focus from problem‑solving to problematisation and enabling participants to collectively formulate concerns, roles, and potentialities. The study used a pragmatic approach, reconstructing collaborators’ experiences through interviews and annotated timelines. Collaborators valued the designer’s work for addressing their concerns and opening new possibilities, and the study concludes that such creative practice enables projects to build on and transcend participants’ expertise and expectations through creative exchange.

Abstract

This paper reports a case study investigating the productive value of designers' creative practice within complex academic-industrial collaborations in which a designer's practice had a formative role. Adopting a pragmatic approach, collaborators' experiences of this project were reconstructed through interviews and 'annotated timelines.' Collaborators were found to value the designer's work in responding to their particular concerns whilst also opening up new possibilities. This paper discusses how such benefit is attributable to the 'designerly thinking' of skilled designers, shifting the focus of work from problem-solving to problematisation and enabling participants to collectively formulate concerns, roles, and potentialities. The paper concludes that designers' creative practice can enable collaborative projects to build upon and transcend participants' expertise and expectations through 'creative exchange.'