Product Scotland: bringing designers, anthropologists, artists and engineers together

This paper describes the work of Product Scotland, a collaborative network of product designers, anthropologists, artists and engineers based in Scotland. One of the key aims of the Product Scotland network is to achieve research excellence through knowledge sharing mechanisms. Scotland's product design network is spread over a large geographical area, across many organisations and institutes, and there lacks a practical, effective platform for pooling knowledge together to enable the creation of collaborative product design research strategies. This knowledge pooling, amongst a group of like-minded researchers, educators and practitioners with diverse backgrounds, experiences and skills including design, engineering, business, anthropology, and fine art will focus Scotland's product design network to become one of international importance. In this respect, Product Scotland goes a long way in attempting to address one of the key recommendations of the Cox Review [1] in that it wishes to establish (in the long term) a national multidisciplinary centre for design and the creative industries. Backed by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Product Scotland developed and ran a series of workshops in Glasgow (Design Creativity), Edinburgh (Design Ethnography), Dundee (Digital Product Design), and Aberdeen (3D Scanning and Rapid Prototyping). The paper reports on these four workshops held between November and December 2007 and will describe the motivations, outcomes and initial results. Based on the results of the four Product Scotland workshops the paper will propose working practices and methods for contemporary, collaborative product design networks of the future.