Design as a Cultural Venue for Interdisciplinary Collaboration.

Sense Making has become the strategic fuel for meaningful Change Making in organizations today. 1 When designers enter into and facilitate large interdisciplinary teams it changes the role of the designer from being characterised by aesthetic professionalism to thinking strategically and facilitating processes in a methodical and systematic manner. The user centred framing of designers, their imaginative capabilities and their expressive skills enable them to span complex boundaries within and across multidisciplinary teams. The aim of the present paper is to outline that designer's methods and visual skills can be the link between mental models and languages that occur in interdisciplinary teams. The designer's methods such as visualization and prototyping as well as their Sensemaking methods2 can strengthen a team's chance to imagine future scenarios and their implications. It provides a common ground for discussing and reflecting on choices made. The article describes two different cases in which the visual methods of designers made Sensemaking possible in the organisation.
The methods used are elements within the design process: visual sensemaking, user observations, interviews, sketching, idea generation, conceptualizing, prototyping, visual representation and evaluation.