How to: Use design as a tool for better collaboration

Bronwen Rees, Knowledge Coordinator, Design Council

What part does design play in creating effective circular systems? This article explores why design is so well placed to support and foster collaboration, and several ways it can be used to help facilitate working together.

Allow for disagreements

During the ideation phase of a project is the perfect time to bring together different perspectives to shape new visions. As Rosie Murphy (Architects for Climate Action Network) noted, “When two opposing ideas come together, it creates something much more original”.

Design is a great tool to support this, as the open-ended nature of the ideation process (common to design thinking principals like the Systemic Design Framework) allows collaborators to investigate, challenge and merge different ideas in an environment that is explorative and free; before needing to converge them into more defined and tangible end outcomes.

Conditions to collaborate

Rosie Murphy (Architects Climate Action Network) also noted that to foster better collaboration, the role of designers needs to shift from creating definitive designed solutions to utilising their creative capabilities, “to develop the processes that encourage more authentic collaboration.” Her work involves designing workshops and activities to help build collaborative skills in others. She says, “By creating an environment where people are free to think creatively, and work in less confined and definitive ways, they can create more inclusive and considerate designs.”

Design as a translating tool

Will Drury (Innovate UK) spoke about the difficulties that can arise with cross-sector collaboration when people’s technical language and knowledge can differ significantly from one another. He highlighted the role designers play in being able to act as translators in these situations, taking complex ideas and making them into tangible visions across disciplines.

Cedrine Streit evidenced this when talking about Visa’s Recommerce lab. They are collaborating with a range of different business partners to research and explore how customers respond to language, software and purchasing systems. They are then using these insights to design interventions to shift people towards more regenerative behaviours.

Co-design and participation

Issac Beevor (Climate Emergency UK) spoke about the power of co-design in ensuring that new policies reflect the needs of those most affected by them. When introducing a school street, a local council used several different co-design techniques to help improve the suitability of the new scheme, and to improve adoption and acceptance of the idea. They made sure to include local residents (parents, teachers, children and neighbours of the school) from early on in the design and planning; getting their advice and inviting them to feed into the process. This led to an outcome that benefited and addressed the needs of the whole community.

Listening

Alon Schwabe (Cooking Sections) has been working on bringing together different stakeholders on the Isle of Sky to better utilise readily available food sources on the island (seaweed and oysters) to help reduce their impact from fish farming. As part of this design process, he created working groups where diverse stakeholders could talk about their varying opinions and differing interests, listening and discussing so everyone better understood each other’s concerns, and felt heard by each other. This shows the role designers can play in connecting different people together, redesigning entire ecosystems, which in this case helped to shift the whole island’s approach to sourcing food towards one that’s much less impactful on our environment.

Architects for Climate Action Network have also created several inclusive facilitation techniques to encourage communication, and allow everyone to contribute and respectfully challenge each other. These techniques include setting a defined agenda, and clearly assigning a facilitator and note taker, as well as some useful hand gestures for non-verbal communication: One finger up: I have a point to make; two fingers up: I have a directly related point to make — skip queue; wavy hands up: I agree, wavy hands down: I disagree.

To further explore how to use design as a collaborative tool, take a look at our Systemic Design Framework and watch back the insightful discussions that underpinned this article from our most recent Design for Planet Festival, which will be available before the end of November on our YouTube channel.