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Designing creative frameworks: Design thinking as an engine for new facilitation approaches

This paper develops a new area of design research – the design of knowledge exchange. The paper describes through the analysis of 2 case studies undertaken by the authors how the design of interactions between participants in activities such as workshops, sandpits and ‘Imagination labs’ can be designed. It argues that the use of a well-developed design process rather than traditional, intuitive approaches, offers significant advantages in addressing the needs of participants.

Working with Dare Digital (a large marketing agency) and MotMcDonald a multinational Civil Engineering company, the paper describes the design of new activities that promote improved iteration and innovation processes in the case of Dare and reimagining how GPs will connect with people such as teenage mothers in the future. We demonstrated that these new creative approaches were more effective than conventional facilitation techniques and make the argument that because these were designed specifically for each context rather than having a set pallet of techniques the design of knowledge exchange offered both a fundamental advantage to practitioners adopting this approach and that this offered a significant new area of professional design practice.

The notion of the design of knowledge exchange draws on interaction design, network, innovation and post-structuralist theory. Cruickshank is using and contributing to these bodies of knowledge through action research methods. These methods are applied in research projects including the Creative Exchange knowledge exchange hub (£5million AHRC) to PROUD, innovative knowledge exchange through co-design (€4 million INTERREG), to Catalyst citizen-led innovation (£1.2 million EPSRC), London Fusion (€2.6 million ERDF) exchange knowledge between the digital and creative sectors), New Ideas (£150,000 HEIF) co-design of KE tools.