Abstract

We postulate that a disconnect between stakeholders and designers, often rooted in an understandable preoccupation with technical rationality, limits how design research is conceptualized in the design science research community. We posit co-creation as a way to overcome this limitation that engages reflective design practice fostering a shared understanding of value among the designers/developers, users, analysts and others. Thus, co-creation is an essential ingredient for design satisfaction in many design endeavors. We proffer a theoretical foundation for envisioning design success as an artefact that realizes co-created conceptual metaphors compositing the objective and subjective qualities shaping the stakeholders’ appreciative systems. This paper positions and advocates for a critical perspective on designer transcendence where design choices and actions are centered on a shared, but evolving, composite understanding of value and quality - satisfaction. Successful co-creative design emancipates users from concern for unnecessary technically rational aspects of artefact design. Further we propose a framework, grounded in semiotics, to hone and revitalize designer transcendence with a design emphasis on efficient and ideally frictionless interfaces - conceptual metaphors - to reduce asymmetry among stakeholder concerns.