The Road Map

This study examines a method for designing a creative process, ‘The Road Map’, and its significance to cross-disciplinary, creative collaboration. The context is a joint Master Program between Copenhagen Business School and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture and Design. Data consists of the course material, written student reports, and interviews.
Findings indicate that The Road Map is supportive to imagining, developing, and orchestrating a shared design process. It enables the integration of diverse perspectives, the combination of individual competencies and itineraries with common activities and goals and turns concepts that are initially hard to grasp into concrete, manageable initiatives that can be delegated. Participants adjust the process together, compensate for pitfalls in the team dynamic, and produce valuable process insights, also for future projects. Unexpectedly, some teams come up with the idea to include their motivation and learning goals in The Road Map, hence forming a link between individual purpose and aspiration and the overall objectives of the course and project, making it conducive to the participants' experience of meaningfulness and empathy towards one another. At present, the method involves collaboration where the participants are physically present. However, future iterations should also enable virtual collaboration.