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.