Design for Conversations

Design for Conversations: Enhancing Intercultural Collaboration Through Evocative Objects

Service design teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To be successful navigating this pluriverse, collaborative teams need to develop mechanisms to embrace and nurture the power of diversity. However, teams often lack specific tools and skills to leverage the strengths of diversity. These workshops aims to provide participants with tools to raise awareness of cultural differences and similarities. These workshops also aims to have participants experience firsthand the impact of materiality – in the form of evocative objects – as enhancers of intercultural conversations. We explore how surfacing a variety of mental models through objects is possible and effective in intercultural teams. Our goal is to demonstrate how teams can use this approach to approach a new problem space from different perspectives, benefiting from the power of diversity.

View the RSD11 conference paper.