Benedicte Wildhagen, Knut Bang and Adrian Paulsen
The Norwegian Design Council and AHO have been collaborative partners for several years through different research projects. These include the service innovation method AT-ONE, Customer Care 2015 and other projects due to both organizations being part of the Center for Service Innovation, and, not the least, our collaboration within the emerging field of system oriented design (SOD). This is important to the Norwegian Design Council because we see the need for new methodology in the design field – to be able to drive innovation and to tackle and solve complex and pressing problems we are confronted with.Our contribution to SOD is mainly in recruiting business cases to the course, to serve as sensors for the SOD master course for the last four years and by using SOD in our own work. This has given us a deep understanding of the potentials and benefits of this emerging methodology. We see our role as a “bridging partner” between the academic, research-based development at AHO and the “real world”. Our aim is making use of system-oriented design methodology; in our own work, in commercial projects with complex challenges, and if possible, to bring back some new insights to the SOD development at AHO.The Norwegian Design Council is the national strategic body for design in Norway. We have a responsibility to collaborate with other governmental organizations, and to find new ways of doing this we have to navigate within very complex structures. As a consequence we have made use of a system-oriented design approach in a joint effort with a national programme within the Norwegian Research Council. This has resulted in a ground-braking partnership where the use of professional designers are made available to scientists in the process of commercializing R&D results
