The Interpretative Dance : Negotiating ambiguity in design and new product development work

The nature of designing and developing new products and services inherently means having todeal with the unknown. This has garnered research attention from many perspectives over the years.Today we know both how to categorize ambiguity and reasons for sustaining or mitigating it. Yet,what practitioners actually do when facing ambiguity is not well understood. For this reason, weintroduce the concept of negotiating ambiguity, meaning to engage in conversation, to makeinterpretations or create meaning, when facing ambiguity. The purpose is to explore how design andnew product development work is made to progress when facing ambiguity. We study this in twocases: one of service design work and one of product design and development work. Usingobservations and semi-structured interviews, three contributions are derived from the material. First,we show that negotiating ambiguity does not stand apart from the ongoing design and developmentwork. Secondly, we portray 14 activities for negotiating ambiguity. Thirdly, the activities arecategorized into four strategies for negotiating ambiguity, namely: constructing points of reference,mediating between perspectives, anchoring in expertise, and visualizing the future. By leveraginginsights from the paper, managers can strengthen how ambiguity is negotiated in theirorganizations, for instance by recognizing the skill of negotiating ambiguity when recruiting andtraining employees.
QC 20240627