Meaning in the Making : Introducing a Hermeneutic Perspective on the Contribution of Design Practice to innovation

In recent years interest has grown in design’s contribution to innovation. However, up-close studies of the meeting between design practice and traditional companies are sill lacking. This may be one reason why rhetoric arguing the benefit of design is often related to innovation concepts that fail to capture tacit and embodied dimensions of design as an aesthetic practice. This thesis builds on the results of an experimental research-approach in which five designers involved multi-disciplinary groups of non-designers in experiencing design practice hands-on in five \"non-designerly\" companies. In the interventions established product understandings were challenged, initially leading to friction. However, the immersion in design hands-on meant that established meaning-spaces were gradually expanded through processes of entwined conversation and hands-on making. In these processes new product understandings were developed through aesthetic deliberation and material practice, which lead to innovative concepts that could not have been developed before the interventions. This study thus sheds light on how the emergence of innovative concepts can be understood as processes of meaning-making, and how design practice may provide the necessary processes for such innovation work. It also suggests that when design practice is abstracted away, as in the concept of design thinking, relevant dimensions of design’s contribution to innovation may be lost.