Collaboration has become more important owing to the challenges designers face to compete in fast-paced global markets. Designers need to capitalise on the strengths of different stakeholders to develop shared knowledge and practices to better deal with the complexity of problems facing society today. This study builds on research concerning social processes in design activity through exploring professional designers' perspectives on the significance of collaboration in their work. Twenty-three semi-structured in-context interviews were conducted with professional designers from 13 different professional specialisations. The interview data were analysed using a grounded theory interpretive approach. The insights developed from the analysis suggest that the development of support for collaborative design should target not only methods of solving design problems, but also informal and social interactions that bring together different stakeholders while respecting their differences. Further research in this area would enhance the effectiveness of collaboration and increase designers' ability to participate in the early stages of product development for complex problems.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 1. Education for Economic Growth or Human Development? Trends in higher education have led educationists and academics to argue that design education has come to function as an alternative form of general liberal arts education (Buchanan, 1992, p. 5). Now students might choose to study design as they might choose to study the humanities and arts, that is, without the intention to pursue design as a career (Schön, 1985, p. 2). Consequently, design education is caught within the 'The Conflict of the Faculties' between design as form of professional education and design as an alternative form of liberal arts education (Friedman, 2003, p. 245). Consequently, a core challenge for university-level design education is meeting the plural needs of educating students for a demanding job in a professional field and preparing citizens for life in the global knowledge economy (Friedman, 2002, pp. 27-33). Liberal arts education, according to Martha Nussbaum (2012), is about "challenging the

Educators in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand have the responsibility to ‘live and model’ the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. However, tertiary education has often treated the principles in an inauthentic way. There are few courses in art, design and communication in New Zealand that integrate the principles authentically. This article showcases features of a course – Mahitahi | Collaborative Practices – that engages with Te Tiriti principles by teaching collaboration from te ao Māori (the Māori world). Our findings draw from a focus group we conducted with academic staff who taught into a pilot iteration of the course. Three central themes emerged from the focus group relating to the issue of decolonizing arts education. First, that regardless of the educators’ intentions to design a course that privileges te ao Māori, the features of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s colonial reality are still present. Second, the students’ primary learning activity was principled reflection, where they successfully engaged with te ao Māori in an authentic way. Third, students’ connection to te ao Māori was jeopardized by designing part of the assessment that took on a Pākehā (non-Māori) world-view. Consequently, students may have missed the opportunity to engage more fully with educative experiences relating to lifelong learning. We argue that to maintain an authentic connection to te ao Māori, the curriculum should be consistently designed around principles embedded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

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