Design, one piece of the puzzle: A conceptual and practical perspective on transdisciplinary design

Abstract

Transdisciplinary research is claimed to be essential in tackling today’s complex societal challenges. Transdisciplinarity includes collaboration and integration across academic disciplines, non-academic ways of knowing, and the ‘real world’ of citizens, professionals and other stakeholders. Design can contribute to transdisciplinarity by framing complex challenges, integrating knowledge towards synthesizing solutions, and providing participatory practices to engage with the real world. However, for design to be successful in transdisciplinary research contexts, a better understanding of transdisciplinarity and design is required. In this paper I present a conceptual and practical perspective on transdisciplinary de-sign. I show how design relates to three different conceptions of transdisciplinarity: a multi-level disciplinary practice, a participatory practice, and a practice focused on complexity and social learning. Furthermore, I propose a set of trans-disciplinary competences that enhance designers’ ability to contribute to tack-ling complex societal challenges, including epistemic intelligence, worldview awareness, power literacy and reflexive and dialogic skills.