| Summary: | This research investigated methods to enhance creative collaboration between designers and expert users, in this case surgeons. I adopted a practice led approach in which I acted both as researcher and designer. In the pilot studies, I explored methods and issues using a variety of expert users as proxies for the surgeons. In the main study, I used two live projects to explore and evaluate strategies identified in the pilot studies. Design methods developed from this research enable expert users to employ designerly strategies in design collaboration. These strategies include co-evolution of problem and solution, problem reframing and exploring the solution through making, in this case, sketching and making mock-ups. The design methods evaluated through the practical work are: Contextual Immersion by the designer. This is a process to help designers to understand user's context through a form of 'apprenticeship'. Mocking Up. It is a co-creation of mock-ups, between expert user and designer as a framework for creative collaboration. Through the research, data were collected in the form of interviews and video recordings on co-design sessions allowing analysis by expert reviewers as well by myself. The analysis of these workshops demonstrated that these collaboration strategies can enable the expert users to mobilize their professional experiences and knowledge in a designerly collaboration. The outcome of this research is a description of a co-design approach which I called Mocking Up, which designers or expert users may use to facilitate collaboration between them. Another outcome from this research was a design artefact, a 'Fistula model' to be used by surgeons and radiologist as a visual and physical reconstruction aid of fistula-in-ano cases.
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