HOW CAN DESIGN METHODS FACILITATE MULTIDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION WORK?
AN OUTLINE TO A RESEARCH PROJECT

There has been little research done in the field bordering design and management. There has also been little research about how designers and non-designers work together in team and what can come out of such team work. There has been much research about methods facilitating teamwork in general – so much that team work has been somewhat of a buzzword the last decade. However, the designers specific knowledge and methods of coordinating different competences has not been taken into consideration in this context. Neither has the design methods possibilities to influence multidisciplinary team work and create effective innovation and development teams been investigated.

Effective innovation needs a number of different professions to be represented. The demands for effective innovation and development processes within the industrial life today are high. An incredibly high number of the project results do not reach the market and amongst the ones that do reach the market, the success rate is low. Effective sharing of knowledge during the innovation process is key to an increased success rate. One way to ensure this is to work with multidisciplinary teams, but even then the work progress is inhibited of time consuming misunderstandings based on ignorance of the different fields involved.

Design being a cross disciplinary discipline itself often demands several competences to interact. How this is carried through differs. The designer has at times been seen as a renaissance person himself, but with increasing complexity the need for specific knowledge at hand is important.

Traditionally the designer work alone with the process tools. Proposing increased interaction in multidisciplinary teams the designer much change the way to work as well as the tools used. Hence the tools must develop from one-man use to use by a workgroup.

The aim of this paper is to present a project that will explore how designers and non-designers interact in multidisciplinary teams and the signification the design process when applying multidisciplinary teams for innovation and product development, from a designer prospective.

The steps of the study will be two-folded. A qualitative study will be carried out first. The purpose of this is to explore to what extent designers work in multidisciplinary teams. This will be followed by a quantitative study. The research population will be manufacturing companies. This population will be compared to a convenience sample of design firms. The purpose of the comparison is to describe the crucial factors for profitable multidisciplinary design projects. Both considering organizational view points as well as how to best use the design process.