Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 73
Co-design
What happens even before co-designing a project?
Launching into co-design assumes there is a ready-made team
of researchers and societal partners to begin this work. But,
in reality, TDR projects have a pre-co-design life, and there
are various pathways of how partners come to a collaborative
project.
For example, researchers may have worked for a long time in
a particular place with a particular set of societal actors on a
particular sustainability challenge. In this case, they are deeply
familiar with the context, the issue at stake, and the people
interested in it. They also have well-established trust and history
working together. Maybe the new TDR project is an outgrowth
of a prior joint project, building on previous findings, identified
needs, and adding in just a few new actors. The collaborative may
have worked together in obtaining the necessary funding, and
people are ready to jump in the co-design process for the current
project.
All too often, however, such ideal conditions for collaboration are
not yet met. Researchers may have had no or only preliminary
contact with societal actors in the process of developing a
research funding proposal. Having been successful in obtaining
funding, they now have the lure (and power) that comes with
resources, but they now must do the hard work of identifying the
full range of necessary collaborators – both in other disciplines/
departments and in the world of practice.
Alternatively, one or more societal actors may have a difficult
challenge and want to seek help from a local university. However,
they may have only one or two contacts there and don’t know yet
who should be brought in to help solve the problem. Also, they
may not yet have funding for the project or fully thought through
Concepts Co-design
what is already known about the issue and what really requires
fresh research.
In short, different actors may have the idea and funding for
the TDR project, but they clearly have different stakes in the
project and may come with different levels of background
understanding, familiarity with the TDR process, and access to all
the necessary expertise and tools to launch into a collaboration.
Therefore, preparations are needed before venturing into
large group co-design settings. These preparations may
involve activities such as scoping exercises, literature reviews,
network mapping, and preliminary discussions to identify
potential research partners and clarify objectives. By laying the
groundwork in the preparation stage, researchers can ensure
that the co-design process is focused and productive. While
co-design is typically used to describe the first phase of TDR
projects, co-design can also be more generally understood to be
the collaborative process of shaping all aspects of a TDR project
and thus also needs to happen in later phases – e.g., to jointly
design interventions, products, and solutions.
Further reading:
•
Horcea-Milcu, Andra-Ioana, Julia Leventon, and Daniel
J. Lang. 2022. Making Transdisciplinarity Happen: Phase
0, or before the Beginning. Environmental Science & Policy
136 (October): 187–97.
•
Klein, J. T. 2001. Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving
among Science, Technology, and Society.
•
Moser, S. C. (2016). Can science on transformation
transform science? Lessons from co-design. Current
Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 20, 106-115.
p. 68
