Design, collaboration and evolvability: a conversation about the future

This paper is an exploratory conversation on collaboration, shared value, ecosystems, platforms, silent designers, the unexpected and ambiguity. It is held together by the idea of evolvability and a continuous loop of creation and design. It aims to report a journey that has no real starting point and no end in sight, and while it refers to a number of thinkers, it does not subscribe to any single school of thought. It has deep foundations in various disciplines, but remains aloof of single perspectives. It has been written as an experiment, in respite from conventional formats of producing academic text. It does, however, maintain an engagement with the serious matter of creating the future of design innovation, suggesting that we need to engage deeply with evolvability to benefit from ambiguity and the unexpected. This means moving from trying to see the future into creating it, a fine task for design.