Several design writers have proposed, or at least implied, that “…we are all designers…” through the
way we manipulate the environment around us, select the items we wish to own, plan, build, buy,
arrange, and restructure things all in a form of design. During the same time, design as a
behavioural phenomenon has increased its capacity and breadth and as a result, design activity extends
from the objects we use on a daily basis to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, political
systems, digital existences, food production, the way we travel and even cloning sheep.

This paper reports on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that
seeks to explore current models of creative practice, examining where disciplinary, conceptual,
theoretical, and methodological edges lie in an attempt to define the significant drivers of any
movements across disciplinary boundaries. The project’s creative workshop activities have also
facilitated comparison of the outputs between single-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary group working
and has allowed the research team to explore how non-designers and designers alike transfigure
creative space during practical design exercises.

The outputs of the first workshop pose fundamental questions for the future of design education
models based purely on disciplinary perspectives and furthermore questions whether current
understandings of design thinking encompass more generalist human traits. The need to educate
designers who can surf across disciplinary boundaries to tackle the 21st century’s emerging complex
and wicked social, environmental and economic issues suggests a radical rethink against the
individual and disciplinary based perspectives that largely prevail.