Almost the entire CRISP team visited Milan last week to take part in the Breakfast Talks and show a bit of our work in progress to an audience looking for hot new design. In a nice little corner of the greater DAE exhibition, we offered people a place to sit and reflect on all the designs they were confronted with throughout the city and showed some examples of research through design. Some stimulating questions were hidden in 'crispy' fortune cookies to get visitors wondering about the role of designers working in multiple stakeholder teams. For instance: What can designers bring to collaborative projects?
There were some interesting responses to these questions during the breakfast talk when strategic creativity was discussed. When asked why it is important for the industry to collaborate with designers on a more strategic level Sissel Tolhaas assigned designers the role of “professional provocateurs”, who dare to take risks and to fail. Elena Pacenti continued on the topic and said designers can bring inspiration to the table, not just information. Me, I was happy to see the fancy design objects didn't do all the talking this week.