Social Value Creation through Multidisciplinary Design Education

Abstract

The paper proposes that design with a multidisciplinary student cohort as active partners can play the role of bringing the four different stakeholder groupings, namely, government, industry, society and academia together within the creative consortia, and create innovation for the greater good of the society. By studying a selection of social innovation projects undertaken by multidisciplinary student teams as connector-integrators, which engaged with companies, government bodies and community groups, we have examined a combination of ‘four’ different activities across different economic and cultural (human experience) contexts to assess their different degrees of appropriateness in creating future value. We apply these methods to establish ‘creative consortia’, which has enabled us to reframe the context of the problem space. We believe that the creative consortia has the potential to create more relevance in the solution space, greater engagement in realising the proposition into the future, and a higher opportunity for integration of such future principles into emerging government policy, and national innovation agendas.