A transdisciplinary perspective on prototyping

New societal challenges influence product development on different levels, from business strategies of companies to engineering activities. For instance, the extension of product centered development to Product-Service Systems including products, services, infrastructure, business models etc. demand specialists of different domains regarding the development of such solutions. Therefore, transdisciplinary team work is not an academic concept, but a necessity in practice. Besides classical challenges regarding team work, transdisciplinary teams have to face differences in the mutual understanding of development concepts, thus, resulting in misunderstandings. The research group Rethinking Prototyping focusses on prototyping processes, in particular by integrating different approaches and analyzing future potential of prototyping. The main idea is to bring different perspectives into collision to learn from each other and develop a common understanding of prototyping. For this purpose a two-day workshop has been conducted, bringing together a group of engineers, architects, interaction designers, media designers etc. Various domain specific design tasks have been analyzed and performed in mixed teams while recording the design process of the group and specific wording of each participant regarding prototyping. This paper describes the research approach and the qualitative results of the study.