Positioning design in transdisciplinary collaborations: Experiences from a smart city consortium project

This paper explores the positioning of design in transdisciplinary collaborations. Design is increasingly positioned as a promising way of working in complex, multi-stakeholder collaboration. In this paper, we want to deepen and challenge this positioning in order to better clarify the contribution of design. Building on literature and experiences from an ongoing consortium-type research project in the context of smart cities, we conceptualize five preliminary roles that design adopts in collaborative settings: (1) generator; (2) communicator; (3) facilitator; (4) mediator and (5) provocateur. We argue that the latter two roles, namely the mediator and provocateur, are the most recent and the most suitable roles in transdisciplinary settings. To fully encompass these new roles, however, design must keep evolving itself and ground its practices with more sensitivity to the ethics and politics of technology. Deepening and expanding these roles will eventually strengthen the position of design when addressing socio-technical challenges.