Susanna Osinga, Tekla Komlóssy, Jotte de Koning, Geert Brinkman, Değer Özkaramanlı, Hannah Goss, Milene Guerreiro Gonçalves, Chetana Pai, Elke Wennekers, Jeltje van der Haer, Sine Celik
Impact-driven research is increasingly transdisciplinary, with design recognised as a valuable contribution to such endeavours (Van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2022). However, integrating design within transdisciplinary research appears to be far from straightforward. While design offers approaches that are generative, participatory, and systems-oriented, it also introduces dilemmas around collaboration, ownership, power dynamics, and the need to navigate between diverse ways of knowing.
To surface and explore these tensions, we engaged in a two-part inquiry: an online questionnaire and a collaborative session with designers working in a variety of transdisciplinary research projects. Through thematic analysis of the collected reflections, we identified three overarching clusters of dilemmas: Doing vs. Deepening, Leading vs. Facilitating, and Friction vs. Harmony.
Rather than prescribing fixed solutions, we propose sets of reflective questions aimed at navigating these dilemmas. These questions are intended to support situated, critical decision-making in complex collaborative processes. Our aim is to advance discourse on socially engaged scholarship and transdisciplinary design by making dilemmas that often remain implicit, explicit. In doing so, we argue that recognising and actively navigating dilemmas is not a task to be avoided, but a core aspect of transdisciplinary practices. Acknowledging such tensions helps to strengthen both process and outcome in collaborative research.
Keywords: transdisciplinary research; design; systemic design; social design; dilemmas