Our first project workshop is over - and now begins the job of digesting what we heard, what we contributed, and preparation for the second workshop on January 29. Around 30 people attended the event held at Saïd Business School from a range of backgrounds and contexts including academia (social sciences, management and design), enterprises and design consultancies.
The main research questions of the project are to find out how these different communities of practice and knowledge understand the designing of services in science and technology-based enterprises. As part of answering these questions, we made extensive use of techniques that involved participants in making representations of their domains of knowledge.
For example, ahead of the workshop we sent participants a "cultural probes" pack to stimulate different ways of thinking about the designing of services. Once people arrived at SBS, the first thing they had to do was produce a cognitive collage and share this with other participants. Through these and other methods, the workshop began to build up two key artefacts for the project - helping with sense-making among this diverse, emergent community: a representation of the current state of knowledge relating to the research area; and the beginning of a shared vocabulary.
We made use of scribing (or visual facilitation) services provided by Sefi Amir of Design Heroine, photography by Christian Toennesen and video documentation by film-maker Flora Skivington. Angela Wilkison of the school's James Martin Institute facilitated. Selected edited versions of these artefacts will be made public here over the course of the project as we endeavour to share both our research process and our findings.
Find out more>>> View images from the workshop in this blog's photo gallery
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