The Design Perspective

Abstract

This chapter of the book contains a first exploration of those defined as ‘collaborative design practices’ within private organisations obtained through a set of interviews and observational studies carried out with different kinds of stakeholders within private organisations. The first round of interviews outlined in the first Sect. 2.1 a set of different interpretations and applications of design thinking in the world of practice. Those have been clustered in what have been called ‘areas of blur’. They refer to: (i) the goal of the activities, (ii) their subject-matter and (iii) their impact. Section 2.2 showcases a series of observations of collaborative design practices. Those observations composed and informed a comparative analysis that was carried out through the identification of a set of variables. The variables refer to specific characteristics of the practices such as: (i) goal of the activities, (ii) variety of participants, (iii) style of guidance and (iv) process design. The observations highlighted correlations between those variables that have been organised in a compass. The compass represents a navigation tool that could support who organises collaborative design practices.