Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

In collaborating with, or reviewing, such an organisation for opportunities of
interdisciplinary innovation, it would be sensible to ask where the boundaries are,
who sets the goals, and whether unanticipated outcomes will be accepted. The
principal advantage is the extent to which a range of networks might be established
for boundary-spanning. Collaboration on a project is certainly a network development
opportunity, but if projects are sufficiently long to establish trust relationships, then it
might be hard to maintain alternative networks, unless the projects themselves are
relatively relaxed with respect to degree of time allocated to them.
5.7. Professional processes
Design professions
Although we have noted that understanding interdisciplinary innovation requires
analytic perspectives on the innovation process that are likely to come from
humanities and social science as well as technology or business, commentators in the
humanities and social sciences are drawing attention to the significance of design
within intellectual trends more broadly.
As noted by Latour (2008), design invites interpretation and engagement with the
material world, rather than the detachment of modernism through which elites are
built on mastery, theory, and control through intervention. He commends the modesty
of craft and recognition of a cultural dimension alongside technical achievement.
These demand multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Nigel Thrift (2006) sees three factors that make design especially important now:
� the obsession with knowledge (including tacit knowledge) and creativity
� the need to draw consumers into the creation process
� extending concepts of interaction from IT into social engineering of groups
Latour and Thrift are social theorists, not designers or design researchers, so they
describe a perceived role of design, rather than actual design practice. Nevertheless,
we can combine this observation with reference to typical design practices such as
sketching, use of prototypes, and engagement with users through methods such as
participatory design, or the novel critical design techniques pioneered in the Equator
investigations of technology experience ‘in the wild’. Indeed the Cox report (2005)
placed design at the centre of the creative economy, as a public policy priority, and
offering a model by which interdisciplinary research would result in economic
benefits for the UK.
Engineering as interdisciplinary practice
Although the word design is currently more fashionable as a description of the human
processes around construction of technology, the professional community of
engineers is larger (and more influential in policy and academic contexts) than that of
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