A Tool to Bridge Design Innovation Research and Practice: The Project Experience Map

Design is reaching out to business and society as an approach to innovation. Consequently, there is a need for collaboration between research and practice: if we want to assure quality of design practices and to build knowledge in these new domains, we need to be able to conduct research into their application and trace these processes as they fold through longitudinal research. The outcomes from these collaborations are often documented in formal reports on other deliverables for partner organisations, and scholarly publications for the researcher; however, the speed and nature of design projects and research processes means critical learnings and opportunities for new knowledge are often lost. Thus, there exists a need for high quality, reliable knowledge capture and transfer methods for the establishment of design practice and research in these new domains. In this paper we offer a new tool, the Project Experience Map (PEM), to assist in this process. The PEM shares the visual layout and principles of an existing design tool, the customer journey map; however, instead of depicting the story of a customer interacting with an organisation, we argue that the PEM can be put to an entirely different use: collating data and insights from design projects.