Abstract
Design and science collaborations are becoming increasingly common. Yet we have little understanding of how both designers and scientists identify what makes a good collaborative project brief, a phase we call treasure hunting. We conducted two studies with 18 designers and 10 scientists to better understand this mechanism: how do designers generate ideas from laboratories and how scientists perceive these ideas? We found that designers’ strategies rely on identifying the uniqueness of the laboratory’s research and their long-term vision. We also identified four strategies to ideate from the laboratories’ research: finding new application domains, bringing the research to the hands of the end-user, styling and finding new research directions. In the second study, we presented the resulting ideas back to professors and results suggest that initial designers’ ideas —sacrificial ideas— can be a powerful tool to support scientists reframing process.
Keywords
collaboration, interdisciplinarity, design brief
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.126
Citation
Maudet, N., Asada, S., and Pennington, M. (2020) Treasure Hunting: an exploratory study of how designers and scientists identify potential collaborative projects, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.126
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Treasure Hunting: an exploratory study of how designers and scientists identify potential collaborative projects
Design and science collaborations are becoming increasingly common. Yet we have little understanding of how both designers and scientists identify what makes a good collaborative project brief, a phase we call treasure hunting. We conducted two studies with 18 designers and 10 scientists to better understand this mechanism: how do designers generate ideas from laboratories and how scientists perceive these ideas? We found that designers’ strategies rely on identifying the uniqueness of the laboratory’s research and their long-term vision. We also identified four strategies to ideate from the laboratories’ research: finding new application domains, bringing the research to the hands of the end-user, styling and finding new research directions. In the second study, we presented the resulting ideas back to professors and results suggest that initial designers’ ideas —sacrificial ideas— can be a powerful tool to support scientists reframing process.