Tipping points in design-led collaboration: attending to moments of emergence in design facilitation practice

Design-led collaborative practice is a rapidly developing disciplinary area where professional, trained designers work beyond their traditional disciplinary landscape often to address complex situations through people-centred approaches. Good design facilitation involves thinking, feeling and experiencing what is happening to adapt to the inevitable unpredictability that occurs when working in co-creative environments. Through a case study of 92 design-led innovation support workshop sessions with SME scale businesses, data was gathered which provides empirical evidence to the existence and characteristics of ‘tipping points’ – crucial moments of tangible emergence – experienced by a team of design facilitators. Inductive analysis of data pointed to 4 key types of tipping points relating to; co-creation, agency, uncertainty and direction. This paper suggests how these different tipping points can be identified and how design facilitators might respond to each of them differently for positive outcomes.