Scientists and designers can have difficulty communicating when they collaborate. Although similar in many ways, they often operate on different timescales and can struggle to understand the goals and processes of each others discipline. With the DLX design lab at the University of Tokyo I developed a tool to enable people to reflect on and discuss their different ways of working. It then enables collaborators to plan projects that achieve the goals of everyone involved.
The tool is currently being used in an ongoing collaboration between the DLX Design lab and a Japanese company to drive interdepartmental innovation.
I collected accounts of the research processes from members of our design and scientific network.
I generalised the activities of the designers and scientists and prototyped a number of card decks that they could use to describe their work. The challenge was for the deck to thoroughly represent both their processes while having enough overlap for them to identify common activities and being small enough to make good sense of.
We prototyped the activity with designers and scientists speaking multiple languages from across the design lab and the Institute of Industrial Sciences.
