Open working practices are increasingly encouraged across the domains of design, business and academia, with concerted efforts made to enable contextual learning and facilitate knowledge exchange between multi-disciplinary partners. Despite the understanding and acceptance of this way working, challenges to collaborative practice exist widely.

This paper aims to explore experiences of learning within a multi-disciplinary collaborative design context. In the same way that Chesbrough (2006) considers open innovation as ‘the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation’, this paper asks how ‘open learning’ within a multidisciplinary collaborative design context can make use of those same flows of knowledge in order to realise value for those participants engaged.

Contextualised within a series of multidisciplinary design-led events in Scotland, emerging themes of learning are identified from across business, academia and design participants. Deconstructing the themes, this paper questions how design can enable wider participatory education practices, with the aim of informing the knowledge and understanding of learning within a multidisciplinary design space.