Thomas Maiorana
Interdisciplinary collaboration is critical to addressing systemic challenges. Given the importance of such partnerships, is it surprising that designers, academics, and practitioners are rarely given a chance to practice how they might work across disciplinary boundaries. In this session, participants will briefly share their research to explore potential connections and highlight the differences between transactional and relational interdisciplinary collaboration frameworks. Through structured activities, participants will explore constituent elements of partnerships, including collaborative foundations, power relationships, language and means of expression, approaches to risk, products of the collaboration, and the potential for transformative outcomes. These attributes help distinguish between transactional and relational interdisciplinary collaboration and offer participants language and frameworks that can be used to construct more effective cultures of collaboration.
Keywords: collaboration, interdisciplinary, language, power relationships, transformation, prototyping, prototype
