From researching to making futures: a design mindset for transdisciplinary collaboration

ABSTRACT

Addressing complex future challenges requires transdisciplinary practices. However, existing approaches for transdisciplinary collaboration tend to be limited to science-expert directions. Successful collaboration across disciplines and diverse contexts requires community agency, blurring disciplinary boundaries, and combining sciences and arts. We argue that traditional and emergent design practices provide a powerful mindset to support productive transdisciplinary collaborations for addressing complex societal problems such as climate change and social justice. Designers, historically, have struggled to translate the practices of arts and sciences into professional practice; and design can be understood as a third way of knowing that is unique from arts and sciences. Designers may use evidence, but they also generate proposals that are about preferred possibilities. We propose components of a design mindset (synthesis, modelling, speculation, facilitation, and implementation) for transdisciplinary teams to enhance future-oriented collaboration outcomes. These guidelines expand research-oriented approaches and can be used for co-designing futures in collaborative work.

KEYWORDS:

• Design mindset
• transdisciplinary collaboration
• making futures
• arts and sciences
• design thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

G. Mauricio Mejía

G. Mauricio Mejía is a strategic design practitioner and scholar. He is an Associate Professor of Design at Arizona State University. His current work is about strategic design and theories of change. He often collaborates with practitioners and researchers in other fields such as health, sustainability, humanities, business, and education. His studies and works with diverse current and emergent design practices and approaches such as design research, visual sense-making, service design, experience design, co-design, and design futures.

Danah Henriksen

Danah Henriksen is an Associate Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University. She researches creativity across multiple areas of education, with a focus on creative teaching practices and skills. In exploring creativity and trans-disciplinary thinking in 21st-century teaching learning, she focuses a major strand of her work on design thinking. She researches how design thinking provides a structure and framework for creative problem solving, allowing people to generate and refine ideas, and move between divergent and convergent thinking, to work through creative blocks and identify solutions.

Yumeng Xie

Yumeng Xie is a Ph.D. candidate in Design, Environment and the Arts at Arizona State University. She holds her BA and MFA degrees in Environmental Design with a concentration in Interior Design. She pursues to be a lifelong inter/trans-disciplinary learner, researcher, and designer. Her current research interests include participatory design, co-design, transdisciplinarity in design education, collaboration in User Experience Research/Design.

Alex García-Topete

Alex García Topete is a writer-filmmaker, entrepreneur, researcher, and alumnus of the PhD program of the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication of the University of Texas at Dallas. His research focuses on transdisciplinary intelligence, knowledge management, and collaboration methodologies, particularly as they relate to the creative industries and their relationship to technology, innovation and knowledge production, social impact, and diverse publics.

Roger F. Malina

Roger F. Malina is an astrophysicist, editor-publisher, and Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the Founding Co-Director of the ArtSciLab, a transdisciplinary research lab focused on hybrid knowledge production, technology, experimental publishing, design, and education.

Kendon Jung

Kendon Jung is a PhD student in Design, Environment and the Arts of Arizona State University. He is also the Zero Waste program manager at ASU. He is interested in leveraging his experience and place to encourage use-inspired research and innovative solutions to economic and social challenges while embedding sustainable practice culture into higher education, private corporations, and public administration. His research is about experience and service design for organizational change and sustainability.