Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
Junior design professionals experience conflicts in collaboration with others, with value differences being one of the issues influencing such conflicts. In a retrospective interview study with 22 design professionals, we collected 32 cases of perceived conflicts. We used a grounded theory approach to analyse these cases, resulting in five conflict categories that group 24 distinct value differences arising in 10 critical moments, an event that causes the value-based conflict. Thus, value differences are underlying the perceived conflicts of junior design professionals on many different occasions during collaboration with others. Conclusions are drawn on setting up guidelines for addressing values in co-design practices and supporting junior designers in their professional development.
MULTIFILE
Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
Breda University of Applied Sciences, Master Imagineering programme students and FHGR, University of Graubuenden, Chur, students from the Digital Business Management, Bachelor programme follow a joint module that has three specific virtual components of interaction: the Experience Design Course, he Ideation Block (Design Hackathon) and the Sustainability and Impact generation (Implementation phase). Further on the joint interaction consists of: joint online lectures and workshops (on a weekly basis); joint online assignments (on a bi-weekly basis) supported by meet-up’s and consultancy sessions and joint online collaborative creative sessions and presentations (regularly).The content that the International Virtual Collaboration encompasses is: The VUCA world we are currently living in (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Tools to innovate and flourish within and beyond VUCA; Experience and Transformation design through business and social canvas modeling; Innovation games and Appreciative Inquiry and Social and business impact generation and assessment.The final joint output that the students (in groups) create (the project is running until mid-January 2023 and then analysis and data processing until March 2023) will be a design concept/model for a specific case/organization with strategic implementation plan and recommendation report.
