research – Dr. İdil Gaziulusoy

More Value to P2P than Uber and AirBnB: The Neglected Commons

Recently, Grattan Institute here in Melbourne published a report on peer-to-peer (P2P) economy arguing it could save Australians $500 million on taxi bills, help them use underutilized assets and generate income and increase employment and income for people on the fringe of the job market. The report argued that governments should adopt policies to facilitate growth of these businesses while also regulating for downsides. It is a worthwhile report to read.

What I’d like to raise as an issue is not the content of this report but the scope. First, the report has left out discussing benefits of a large portion of P2P economy that is commons-based and framed “the” P2P economy as businesses who own proprietary online platforms that allow people to “sell” their services (let it be provision of a ride or a clean bed or use of a product for a few hours) to others. The businesses thus enable “micro-businesses” –which is great- but without necessarily empowering those micro-businesses by enabling them to contribute into the development of the platforms, co-designing of the business model the “mother” corporation operates under or by providing a fair share of the value generated although the overall value in these systems are generated by those micro-businesses.

Grattan Institute’s report is unfortunately not the only publication that overlooks the commons-based P2P economy; this is a common attitude in media and research institutes alike. This could potentially be attributed to the high lobbying power that is held in the hands of “sharing economy corporates”. For example, I remember attending a “policy pitch” event at the Grattan Institute in February 2015 on “regulating the peer-to-peer economy”. This event featured David Plouffe, Uber’s Senior VC of Policy and Strategy at the time, who is in fact a political strategist and was the campaign manager of Barack Obama in 2008. He flew all the way to Australia to legitimize Uber which was facing a for amount of rage from the taxi sector as happens in every city Uber “disrupts”. Since then, us Uber users in Melbourne receive offers from Uber to cuddle kittens in our offices for 15 minutes delivered by Uber drivers etc; we’re used to Uber “making our day” through advertising campaigns all targeting the correct demographics and therefore cannot say no when we receive messages that go like “Sign a petition so that Uber is not banned in your city”.

The neglected part of the P2P economy needs more attention though; first technically it has been around much longer than the uberised versions and can easily be traced back to early days of open software movement. Second, there is a lot of under-appreciated value in commons-based P2P economy. To understand this a bit more, particularly in the context of sustainability transitions and resilience in cities, we in VP2040 project undertook some exploratory research that also involved an expert consultation and prepared a summary report of our findings.

I strongly recommend a full read; it’s an interesting report with references to lead thinkers in this area and features the best examples of peer-to-peer commons economy. But for those who prefer protein drinks over real meals because they’re too busy to indulge in life, here’re the key messages:

There are three value models competing for dominance in the digital economy: traditional proprietary capitalism, peer-to-peer exchange and peer-to-peer commons models. The latter two were relevant to our investigation.

In a peer-to-peer commons economy there is an effective creation AND sharing of a resource by peers. A peer-to-peer exchange model is about creating and financially benefiting from platforms that connect peers to trade, sell, or rent excess idle resources. The difference between the two value models is a lack of consideration and contribution into the commons in the implementations based on the latter model.

The direct socio-environmental impacts of the two peer-to-peer value models are similar. The main differences are indirect and structural and stem from the different implications of the two value models in business model development, product and service design and structure of wage-labour relationships. See table below.

Summary of indirect and structural socio-environmental impacts of the two value models

Peer-to-peer exchange model

does not address overconsumption or deal with consumerism at a cultural level

the dematerialisation effect observed by some is not because there is less material throughput in the economic system, it is because there is an additional, very resource efficient economic sector based on cognitive labour

does not raise environmental awareness as argued by some but only reinforces the existing awareness (at best)

planned obsolescence is an inevitable part of business models which are for-profit

the users are not contributors to the platforms which creates a wage-labour dependency

Peer-to-peer commons model

assists with re-establishing the relationships between workers, products, users and means of production through localisation and direct participation (except in cases in which low-cost raw materials come from somewhere else)

encourages diffusion of local knowledge, therefore incentivises designs that suit best to the context

encourages higher resource efficiency (planned obsolescence and other means of creating artificial scarcity is contradictory to the logic of a commons based economy)

circulation of commons does not necessitate an increase in scale as the value is created by a reciprocal relation between benefit and nurture. Nevertheless, the peer-to-peer commons value model is agnostic about growth which might be a barrier for sustainability because any digital commons necessitate natural commons

A digital economy in which a set of companies own or control important city data poses a danger for cities as it creates the risk of ‘data feudalism’ as well as incentives for business models that undermine sustainability and resilience. There are also unresolved ethical questions about ownership and use rights of data generated by citizens through the use of proprietary or non-proprietary peer-to-peer platforms.

There are different options for how digital technologies can be deployed in cities depending on which technologies and business models are implemented. However, it is uncertain which options will yield to highest sustainability and resilience outcomes.

Based on the expert consultation and our research findings and reflections, we proposed the following policy recommendations under four main categories:

Developing and Implementing Citizen-centric and Democratic Governance Models

Understanding and leveraging institutional, organisational and cultural enablers for creating sharing cities
Developing and implementing models of governance for the physical and digital urban commons
Facilitating and widening the scope of public debate on urban data and peer-to-peer alternatives
Facilitating participatory decision-making and budgeting

Managing and Leveraging Urban Data

Supporting the development of a digital open design commons and open information platforms
Establishing and supporting experimentation with data and technologies in cities

Developing and Supporting New Models of Business and Securing Finance

Educating, empowering and collaborating with digital entrepreneurs to direct innovation efforts and resources towards decarbonisation projects
Identifying and developing financial enablers of the digital economy that will assist in radical decarbonisation

Maintaining Socio-economic Resilience

Leveraging the expected changes in distribution and number of jobs across sectors by creating employment opportunities that will help shift to a decarbonised economy

Research and Teaching Statement

I’ve completed two years in Melbourne and on the Visions and Pathways 2040 project. My contract will end in 18 months and it’s uncertain whether there will be additional funding for me to undertake more research at VEIL, where I am working currently. Given academic recruitment is a long process, it’s likely that I’ll start looking for faculty positions here and elsewhere in the near future. So, for the sake of preparation I wrote up a new research and teaching statement. The reason why I post it here is two-fold. First, it explains what I’ve done and what I’d like to do in the future – the focus and direction of my research. So, it’s a document portraying who I am professionally really well. Second, I’m interested in getting some feedback to improve it along the way and making it public creates this possibility. Below.

Research and Teaching Statement

Vision & Progress

My career vision is to be among the world’s leading researchers in the area of design and innovation for sustainability in five years’ time and educate new generation designers who are able to address the complex, socially relevant challenges human society is facing through ecologically and socially regenerative, technologically appropriate design practice which is aware and reflective of its own politics. In order to achieve this, so far I have accomplished the following: 1. Completed a PhD project in 2011 on aligning actions of design and innovation teams with structural changes associated with currently unfolding system innovations and transitions in Sustainability Science and Engineering Program of University of Auckland, New Zealand; 2. Started developing a theory of design for system innovations and transitions through the lens of sustainability science; 3. Gained lecturing, post-graduate supervision, program leadership and curriculum development experience in the years following completion of my PhD in School of Design and School of Business of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; 4. Have become a Visiting Researcher at Design For Sustainability Research Group of Technical University of Delft starting from 2011; 5. Gained research, research team facilitation, project management and stakeholder engagement experience in a large, collaborative, multi-stakeholder project which bring together representatives from research institutions, industry, government and general public to envision and strategise towards low-carbon and resilient futures in Australian cities using design-led, participatory methodolodies in my current role as Principal Researcher at Victorian Eco-innovation Lab, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Research Direction

My research direction sits at the cross-section of design research, futures studies and sustainability science. This is aligned with emerging practices in design for sustainability in following ways: First, focus of design for sustainability is shifting from artefact to systems change. Second, there is an observable cross-fertilisation of design research and futures research. This enables design practice to adopt longer term timeframes than timeframes that has been traditionally adopted in design practice as well as asking questions about the future of design profession. Third, there is a developing understanding in design that sustainability issues cannot be reduced to solely environmental or social problems, that these co-exist and mutually exacerbate each other, therefore, techno-centric or socio-centric approaches in design, on their own, fall short in addressing these highly complex problems with many dimensions. In my research, I would like to keep on developing the emerging theory of design for system innovations and transitions. This direction involves merging of research directions which are either about political questioning or technological enabling that can be part of design research and practice. Specific questions that I would like to investigate involve: 1. How can we design for enabling self-organisation in human systems (relevant to group behaviour during crises and societal transformations but also to new models of governance that we observe emerging currently)?; 2. What new paradigms do we need in design practice in addition to human-centredness if we are going to be designing not solely for creating the technosphere but also for adapting to changes in the socio-ecological sphere (relevant to climate change adaptation and sustainability transformations in our built and natural environment)?. My research, on one hand, aims to push the theoretical boundaries of design with references to sustainability science and system innovations/transtions theories, while on the other hand, develop methods and tools based on this expanded theoretical territory for the use of practicing designers. One good example of this is the scenario method I developed during my PhD for the use of design and innovation teams to be able to align their design decisions and strategic priroties with the necessary long-term societal transformations. Other, less comprehensive processes stemmed from my work on cities of Australia which aim at enabling development of systemic future visions using design-led participatory approaches.

Teaching Approach

My teaching is informed by and continuously evolve through my research. For example, in my lecturing position at Auckland University of Technology, I taught a course on design futures. I designed this course to have two components of inquiry: one on evolving perceptions of design and designer by looking at iconic examples of sci-fi literature and cinema, the other on the emerging role of design in strategic creation of alternative futures with references to changing social context. Another course I taught was on sustainable design. In this course which was delivered to students from School of Business, I introduced different levels of design interventions including product improvement, product redesign, functional innovation and system innovation and got the students to design a business model that would utilise one or more of these levels to address a sustainability problem. In other, more self-directed courses, in which projects were developed by students based on their particular interest, I asissted student learning and exploration by bringing in to students’ attention theories and practical approaches that may be relevent to their project and by creating spaces for them which would both facilitate critical inquiry and practical implementation.

The basic premise of my teaching philosophy is empowerment of students to construct their own learning by being increasingly less directional as they mature in their studies. There are three main components of my teaching: content and context, skills and practice, and, reflection and improvement. Content and context constitutes the theoretical and context specific knowledge students need in order to undertake design projects. I both provide this information and also teach ways of finding relevant and effective information themselves. Skills and practice is the knowledge the students need to cultivate to conceive, develop and implement design solutions based on contextual knowledge of the problem. This involves teaching about design research and creative inquiry methods across a wide spectrum of practice framework including but not limited to product design, service design, and systems design. Reflection and improvement involves guiding students to adopt best-practice in professional development by teaching them tools and methods of reflective practice that also includes encouraging them to reflect not only on their design practice but also on framings, worldviews, politics and values that might have informed their design practice.

In my teaching, I treat the learning environments as an emulation of a professional setting which reflects the values and practices underlying the “better future” we want to create, thus providing students with an experiential opportunity for learning about cultivating collegialitaly and collaboration in multi-cultural multi-skill team interactions. In order to achieve this, I facilitate development of a group purpose and group culture at the beginning of semesters in each class. I encourage my students to challenge me, thus empowering them to question credibility and authority in power structures before developing trust in leadership. In my opinion, savviness in questioning power structures is a fundamental skill for professionals who will be involved in the grand project of humanity in achieving sustainability without compromising from socially fair and democratic processes.

I have research and teaching experience in three countries; Turkey, New Zealand and Australia. I am a citizen of Turkey and New Zealand having lived in both for several years. These two countries have extremely different social and cultural structures, natural and built environments and value positions on nature, democracy, social relationships and ethnic identity. I have also studied, undertaken research and lectured across several disciplines including engineering, design, business and sustainability science. As a result of these geographical and disciplinary exposures, I cultivated a dynamic understanding of the world which also informed my research and teaching substantially, enabling me to develop a comprehensive and unique approach to research and teaching in the area of design for sustainability. I am hoping to find academic mobility opportunities in the future that will both appreciate and expand this unique research and teaching outlook.

August 2015

Reflecting on 2014 at the Blurred Boundary of Personal and Academic Experiences

It’s mid-December; a summer day in Melbourne, beginning of the final week before the holidays. 2014 has been a challenging year for me more than it was rewarding. The challenges mostly stemmed from steep learning curves I encountered associated with the “newness”; adapting to life in a new city, adapting to a “research only” academic position after three years of juggling lecturing, research and program leadership, finding my own feet (or not) in a new project in a new area (the urban) focusing on a new context (Australia). Time for a reflective account at the blurry boundary of personal and academic life in 2014.

A New City

I have completed one year living in Melbourne in August. This city where I came knowing absolutely no one has treated me very nicely by offering many creative and intellectual stimuli which kept me and my mind occupied and content despite the difficulties associated with the absence of an established social network. Being born into a city is an entirely different experience than acquiring it as home later in life as a mature person, even if temporarily but for an extended period of time. Currently I know many things about Melbourne that born-here Melbournians do not such as the mysterious Cave Clan thanks to Sophie Cunningham’s delectable book “Melbourne” which enabled me to bond with this city as a result of developing a historical and contextual understanding of it. The stories of how different migrant communities came here are full of fascinating details as well as the early colonial history of the city. Melbourne has never been boring for me in this year and there’re still many to discover about its history, culture, architecture and diverse communities. Nevertheless, experience of place is closely associated with experience with the people of the place. I have been lucky to meet with some people through my Turkish and New Zealand networks so now I have a few people to hang out with and enjoy several attractions the city has to offer. Nevertheless, I still have not build deep enough relationships with anyone. Whenever I think of a potential emergency, I cannot think of a person whom I’d call for help. An unsettling and a first ever occurrence in my life. Relationships take time to mature and require a lot of mutual effort. I know this is not a unique experience of mine but many others, some of whom being close friends scattered across the world by choosing to be mobile members of the global labour force for we follow positions that suit our unique expertise, financial expectations and lifestyle choices rather than choosing a place to settle and making the most of what’s available there for our ever insatiable intellectual and emotional needs. What we rejoice in and suffer from have a lot of commonalities no matter where we are in the world: missing family, friends, connections that are in fact sustained offline, in cinemas, cafes, beaches, museums, and around our own dinner table instead of on Skype or on Viber. We are an emerging sociological phenomenon: rootless white collars of the global urban. In an internet connected world where traditional office space is becoming redundant for many professions this is a contradiction. Just like Buckminster Fuller had to stop being a polyphasic sleeper because his business partners found his work patterns disruptive, we are expected to be “working” at the same time as our immediate colleagues. Although displays the importance and influence of local economic interactions in individuals’ lives, I find this requirement archaic and I’m dreaming of a time when I can work from anywhere I please for anyone in the world who’d like to receive my services. As much as I love living in Melbourne, if I could do the work I’m doing from anywhere I wouldn’t choose to live here. This has been one of the revelations of this year. The following question is of course revolves around the relative importance of the work I’m doing in the big picture of my life. This is something I’ll reflect on in 2015. One thing that clearly occurred to me is that I don’t want to move to yet another new city, ever again. My wanderlust has settled, at least seems to be for the time being.

Here’s a piece of research related reflection stemming from my experience of having recently moved to a new city: In envisioning futures of cities, we mostly assume those futures are for permanent inhabitants. How would a desirable, sustainable, resilient city look like, feel like, be like if more than half of its population were temporarily but for extended periods of time residing there. System innovation work involves strategising for the transformation of socio-technical systems meeting societal needs or “functions”. We assume the need to be met in similar ways or function to be fulfilled to carry the same characteristics, but what if it all changed? For example the need for shelter is met by housing development although property ownership is not anymore merely for meeting a basic need but also for investing. So some people own more than one residential property while increasingly more (but not yet many) people in big cities opt out from the option of buying a house and commit to renting throughout their life for this or that reason one of which is “being mobile” like myself. What are the economic, cultural and social implications of a potential mass movement of not buying but renting in cities? What institutional, organisational, social innovations would be needed to make a city functional, desirable and liveable in such a scenario?

A “Research Only” Position

One thing I can say: I miss teaching. I miss teaching not only because I see teaching as a great way of intervening in the systems I’d like to see change but also because managing time and measuring performance is much easier when there’re set short-term commitments to fulfil. I thoroughly enjoyed the few experiences of guest lecturing this year. In teaching you know that you touched someone’s intellectual buttons almost immediately but in research your influence is spread over longer term and is indirect most of the times. I think I am a short-term interventionist although my research is about the long-term changes. This personal characteristic, which seems like a dilemma in the first place, is resolved through my research ambition-i.e. linking micro-level changes with macro-level transformation. Nevertheless, my work in this has remained dormant throughout this year. I’ve been feeling that I’ve been fulfilling project tasks without any creative license so I took the initiative to start developing two small projects I can do with project partners which I can frame, design and run. I need to be strategic in how I manage these as the only way I will be green light by my manager is if I demonstrate direct relevance and importance of these projects to the main project I’m employed for. The whole phenomenon of having a “manager” has been challenging for one I chose to be an academic in order not to have a manager as such. I miss being my own research boss. In this process, I also reflected on what I’d like to achieve with my work and many questions arose if academic career is still the best option for this. These questions gave birth to other questions on the most suitable base for my academic work and a potential of mixing of academic work with consultancy. I don’t yet feel ready to make any major changes in my current set-up. All I can conclude from this year is that transdisciplinary research doesn’t go down well in traditional research universities no matter how niche the immediate base of the researcher is; same performance criteria applies to all researchers at central level and disciplinary researchers always have the advantage in an institutional set-up that is still predominantly disciplinary. But all of this is irrelevant if I don’t aspire a faculty position where I’m currently working at the end of my contract.

A New Area of Research in a New Context

I find the urban as a research area fascinating for it is a highly complex system and increasingly a focus in sustainability transitions and system innovations research as a key intervention context. On the other hand, I was hired for the project I’m working on because of my expertise integrating sustainability science, system innovation/transitions theories and design research, at least this was my understanding. When I pointed out at the time when I was offered the position that I don’t have in-depth knowledge of urban theories, I was reassured that there were other researchers in the project with this expertise and so my shortcoming in this area was not an issue. My hope was to continue developing my expertise in integrating design research with system innovations/transitions and sustainability science. However, this hasn’t been the case so far. The first year of the project passed by fuzzy front end work involving engaging with stakeholders, organising workshops, writing foreground papers with no academic novelty, and trying to adapt to being a member of a collaborative team which, after fifteen months still struggling to collaborate effectively. The roles and how we will bring in knowledge and expertise from our respective domains has not been clarified. I struggled with finding my feet, framing my own contribution and positioning design research in the project. I cannot say that I have succeeded in this yet. It is unclear to me how design research fits into the project as it is mostly focusing on policy. Although there are several opportunities to bring in design research into the project, including policy making, design research focuses on the micro level and the project focus remains very large-scale. The kind of design research I’m interested in is about people and practices more than it is about artefacts and technologies; the project focuses more on the technologies and physical elements of the urban. Although there is emphasis on the requirement of socio-cultural change and organisational transformation, and that design research can offer a lot in this regard, as a result of running a highly ambitious project, in a politically challenging time of Australian history in relation to climate change, with a small team with only one member having an interest in and knowledge of design research and a relatively small budget compared to similar projects undertaken elsewhere I am not sure if there will be opportunities for me to use my expertise effectively and build on it through this project. This is also another reason why I started developing small side projects with partners; so that I can directly work with the “users” of the project to make project learnings immediately relevant for their organisation through different methods of design research. This is also aligned with my desire to build on my specific research interest of linking micro level with macro level in system innovations and transitions. But as I stated above, I am uncertain if my time allocated to these small projects will be seen justified. I am learning to negotiate my way to meet my needs as a researcher while meeting the needs of the overall project.

Besides navigating my way through these challenges, I managed to squeeze in trips to New Zealand and Turkey in June and September respectively. I wrote about my New Zealand trip in the previous post but I didn’t get a chance to report on my Turkey trip. Although it was officially a holiday, I met with very interesting people who are working in sustainability, futures and social entrepreneurship fields which gave me the insight that the discourse and practice in sustainability, strategic design, futures inquiry and entrepreneurship has come a long way since I left the country in 2005. I could observe this in my annual visits looking at the steadily increasing number of people attending the lectures I gave and workshops I held. Nevertheless, during the time I spent in Istanbul this year, I had the chance to interact with professionals in addition to academics and became aware of a few exciting initiatives including Studio X Istanbul (Istanbul base of global urban think tank), Gelecekhane (futures think tank), Kadikoy Council’s design thinking initiative and S360 (an international sustainable business consultancy). One of the highlights of my time in Istanbul was having to -thanks to a sweet-talking friend- give a “lecture” about my experiences of Gezi Park protests to Danish sociology students right in the heart of Gezi Park with only two hours notice. I tried to frame this on-the-spot-spontaneous-lecture in the context of global urban based social movements focusing on the right to environment to make it somewhat academically relevant to my work although the students were more interested in hearing about first hand anecdotes about the events.

I think Turkey is currently a very interesting context to look at through system innovations / transitions lens. On one hand policies and practices that are completely counter any understanding of social, cultural, environmental sustainability at the central government level, on the other hand, a wide variety of niche innovations initiated by some local governments and a young urban entrepreneurial population which is no less informed, knowledgable, creative than its global counterparts but perhaps with fewer resources and less empowerment than some.

Convergent Conversations – Transformational Grief, “The Infinite Game” and Love

I spent the past week in Auckland on off-site academic duty commissioned by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) to evaluate two interconnected degree programs on game development. I also gave a public lecture on Visions and Pathways 2040 project at Transforming Cities Research Cluster of University of Auckland. NZQA duty was full-on yet straightforward; a great first experience which gave me insights on how the big machine of academic institution works from an evaluator’s perspective. Around thirty people attended the public lecture from universities and the Auckland Council. Besides being a fruitful exercise of academic networking, it did not yield to anything spectacular worthy to report apart from an observation that systemic research approaches like VP2040 is still rare and disciplinary conservatism mostly prevails across the board.

Besides these “business”, I also had a chance to catch-up and have conversations with several people who are both parts of my professional network but also friends and inspirers of my work on the general topic of sustainability transitions. What made my trip worthwhile were these one-to-one, over-the-coffee/food/beer conversations which touched upon several themes that I’ve been mulling over for a while. Some of the conversations were continuation of previous conversations I had with these people both online and offline over the past few years. Some also echoed conversations I’ve been independently having with people I recently met here in Melbourne as well as with members of my international network indicating an increasingly converging grand narrative underlying the emerging sustainability transitions.

Following the news by NASA a few weeks ago which confirmed the decline of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet as irreversible, my friend Maya posted a Facebook status update stating her desire to weep accompanied by other signs of despair and asked her friends “how will we live on this world?”. I met Maya through a common friend seven years ago. She has a consultancy called Mind Balance where she offers, among other services, workshops on mindfulness meditation. During my PhD years Maya and I used to catch up over coffee and have long, fascinating conversations about what’s happening to the world and what should be done to create change. My head-heavy contributions about system innovation at technological, organisational, institutional and socio-cultural levels were complemented by her insights and knowledge on becoming and staying present, being self-aware and mindful and how spirituality connects with systemic transformations. I always found conversing with her very refreshing; they unlocked the shackle of my analytical brain. Maya has always represented calmness and groundedness for me, therefore, seeing her in such despair was very unusual. For that reason, my contribution to responses given to her was a call to overcome grief and despair to be able to think and strategise: “Although I fully understand the need for grief, we cannot let ourselves get lost in despair. This is a time for big change and the question is how we will prepare for what’s likely to unfold from now. Adaptation comes with a whole new set of questions on “how” which needs to be articulated in all of its dimensions; ethical, political, spiritual, technological and organisational.” In retrospect, I realised my response on that day to Maya wasn’t empathic enough.

Not long after this interaction with Maya, Gary, one of the executives of the Auckland Permaculture Workshop sent the other APW executives and collaborators including me an email asking our opinions on including models of the grieving process in APW course material with references to dealing with the idea of and getting prepared for potential unavoidable collapse. He particularly referred to the Kübler-Ross model which explains grief as a five stage process of passing through phases of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Gary and I, as well as another APW executive Finn met in Auckland last Friday. Among other topics of common interest –Gary is now teaching the Design and Innovation for Sustainability paper I used to teach at AUT- we touched upon the topic of grief. I expressed my concern with Kübler-Ross model based on its linear conception of grief and lack of a transformational element following “acceptance” phase, which, in my opinion, is necessary for linking grief to empowering oneself as well mobilizing action. Kübler-Ross model is developed for terminally ill people or for people who lost something dear to them such as a loved one; therefore it is understandable that “acceptance” is the final phase as such a loss cannot be remedied. Other models complement this model by offering models for “healing” which is relevant to dealing with societal collapse, nevertheless insufficient as they focus on the individual while we need to work with models focusing on groups of people. We concluded that our search for appropriate models of transformational grief would continue. I told Gary and Finn that I didn’t find the task uplifting and I wasn’t sure if my best fit was facilitating grief as my work focused on transformation of an undesirable unsustainable state. I told them that I saw collapse as only one possible –yet increasingly more probable- mechanism and that I chose, for the time being, to remain somewhat hopeful that we might find the creative resources within ourselves to avoid a complete collapse.

Gary and Finn along with many sensible others have been busy for several years putting their adaptation measures in place. A couple of months ago I had a Skype conversation with two of my friends –a couple, Tuna and Pinar- from Turkey who are strategic consultants for sustainability. They’re based in Istanbul; a city in social and ecological decline of accelerating pace. Being worried for not focusing on assuring my own resilience for what is likely to unfold during my lifetime I asked Tuna and Pinar if they had any strategic direction for themselves such as moving from Istanbul and establishing a base with fertile land and reliable community. Their response was heartbreaking yet honourable: “We don’t have any hope that things will get better here but we’re not going to leave the city. We will keep on doing what we believe needs to be done until the time when we cannot anymore. We don’t have a strategy for ourselves, we don’t need one, we don’t want one. Wherever everyone else ends up, so will we end up there too. We don’t think we can allow ourselves to have privileges.” Had this relieve my anxiety about not having proofed my future? Not really. Nevertheless, it resonated with my reasoning for not being “proactive”. It also amused me by reassuring how spot on Nietzsche was in defining the concept of “Turkish fatalism”. I cannot help but wonder though if the difference between the Gary-Finn-and-alike approach and the Tuna-Pinar-Idil-and-alike approach stems from the different cultures of individualism versus community-orientedness or differences in risk perception and risk management approaches.

Before meeting with Gary and Finn on Friday, I spent close to three hours with Niki Harré who is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland in the School of Psychology. She is the author of Psychology for a Better World: Strategies to Inspire Sustainability and she is currently busy designing a game inspired by James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games”. The game aims to identify what is of finite (extrinsic) and what is of infinite (intrinsic) value for people as a means to gain insight into how we can live well together (a question echoing Maya’s cry). Another aim of the game is to help people identify the finite games they have to play to keep playing The Infinite Game. As a community psychologist Niki is interested to understand motivational approaches to facilitate sustainability transitions. This created an immediate connection between her and I a couple of years ago and I helped Niki at very early stages of the development of the game. If I didn’t end up moving to Melbourne I would be her “design coach” (an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed). Since the first prototype, Niki has run several workshops throughout New Zealand with groups of individuals as well as with organisations. She told me that the consistency of people’s deepest or infinite values is what has been most obvious from these workshops. While the natural world appears in the workshops as of intrinsic value, it is weaker than human qualities and emotions. She suggests this shows that people put people first. I questioned whether this could be proved true cross-culturally. She referred to her father’s statement (he was a cultural anthropologist) that indigenous communities use the natural world for their own purposes and that “living in harmony with nature” was a myth. She has since investigated this and found, for example, that fishing prohibitions in Pacific peoples are not because they cared for the fish but because this created opportunities for others to utilize the resource. To the extent that they understood nature and how to work with it, this was not because they wanted to live in harmony with nature but because they wanted to live well together as a human society. What does this tell us? Unfortunately one can never have sufficient time with people like Niki.

On Saturday I went to Maya’s place; we had lunch together and then went out for a walk on the beach. We did not follow up on topics of collapse or grief. It was mostly a conversation on happenings of our respective lives since we last saw each other in July 2013. We articulated the changes that have taken place in our views of people, places and ourselves including what we think our work is and should be. Then we sat on a bench and remained in silence for a while admiring the Rangitoto Island right across from the beach. Maya broke the silence, “Look, we don’t know what will happen even the next minute. We don’t know when Rangitoto will erupt but we know it will sooner or later, maybe even while we’re seated here, or long after we died. Nothing is certain and everything ever changes. Don’t paralyse yourself by getting lost in detail. You need to hold onto your truth and act from a place of integrity at any given time. That’s what matters.” I wondered what prompted Maya to make these remarks but didn’t ask for they fell in their places within me.

On that evening I went to a party to celebrate the long-awaited completion of my close friend Dan’s PhD. His topic was about issues faced in a contaminated site clean-up process in Mapua, New Zealand. Initially a technical research, Dan’s discovery on why an effective clean-up could not be achieved indicated reasons less to do with technical aspects and more with appropriate community engagement. Trained as an ecologist and an environmental engineer, facing the requirement to address his research question from a social science perspective resulted in Dan embarking onto a nine years long ordeal of undoing and redoing his project. In earlier years, Dan had several conversations with the local community several members of which fell sick due to contamination. He identified with the community members and lost track of his research for a while. Although I was one of the closest witnesses to his ordeal, I’ve never seen even a small piece of writing; he never felt ready to disclose his work. He changed it a lot, restarted few times, had to take time-off to recover from emotional fatigue the project caused him. Echoing his experience of identifying with the community while acknowledging the other difficulties associated with complex contaminated site clean-ups, finally he developed a new, very sophisticated psychosocial framework. The core elements of the framework include development of presence; self-empathy and empathy with community participants; rational and systematic understanding of the contamination problem from multiple perspectives; and empowerment of community as well as environmental manager perspectives. It was great to finally witness his completion which also meant uncovering of an age long mystery for our friends circle: what is Dan’s thesis?

To celebrate his completion and catch up on a one-to-one basis, I took him out for dinner a few evenings before the party. We talked about many topics as we have several common professional interests as well as a long personal relationship. While we were waiting for our desserts the conversation found its way to the topic of “love” with references to the “empathy” theme in his thesis. This reminded of my recent revisit of Dennis Meadows’ chapter on tools for transitions to sustainability in the book entitled “The Future of Sustainability”. Meadows counts love as one of the tools; the others are visioning, networking, truth telling, and learning. I recently had a brief interaction about this with a colleague in Melbourne who argued that love is not a tool but the fundamental basis. I disagreed although didn’t get a chance to voice and articulate this disagreement. I understood why he thought love was the fundamental basis, but for me there is one thing more fundamental than love which is fearlessness (distinct from courage) as it enables love; fear is a constant disabler for love to emerge. Also fundamental doesn’t mean absolute or self-manifesting. One has to work continuously to become fearless, or to act from a position of love. On top of this, love is an elusive concept and English language is not helpful either because of its “poverty” having only one word for love. This has always caused me a lot of struggle as I could never articulate the differences of several concepts that exist in my language all of which can only be translated as “love” as a result of this poverty. Therefore I always found the English word love iffy and unsatisfactory for explaining such a grand and rich human feeling. While I was reciting these thoughts to Dan he stopped me and said: “Don’t refer to love as a feeling, it is not”. I became perplexed and thought we were maybe having a language problem and asked “then what is it?”. He said “It is a state of existence when there is nothing else, I mean nothing else getting in the way”. I responded: “Oh, I loooove this dessert, don’t get in the way please” as a way of hiding a huge defeat, a lightning strike kind of check-mate behind my spoiled nature. Dan, knowing me very well that I revert to demagogy when I accept that I lost an argument, chuckled.

Before I caught my plane back to Melbourne, I popped into the newsagent at the airport. Among a poor selection of magazines (more magazines on “men’s interest” than “current affairs”), I picked New Zealand Geographic’s May-June issue because it had a special feature on climate. The piece must have been written before the breaking news on West Antarctic Ice Sheet as one article stated “there are signs of instability” rather than mentioning irreversible decline. The feature covered articles on findings of ANDRILL (which looked at ice cores to understand past climate and implications of current projections on stability of ice sheets and concluded that previous projections were conservative) and retreat of New Zealand glaciers especially of Franz Josef. From what I read I realized that Franz Josef, which, when I visited in 2008, left me in awe with its mass, beauty and vulnerability, retracted steadily that now tourists have to walk three kilometres to reach the terminal face and it is not safe anymore to climb the glacier as its front is very unstable so you have to be dropped from a helicopter to the top if you desire to do a walking tour. I obviously was being slack in practicing my “spiritual aikido” which I use to deal with the type of information I’m exposed to on a daily basis; a self-desensitisation routine. All of a sudden I felt like stabbed in the heart by the fact that no piece of land or place I felt connected to, developed a deep love towards, or dared to call home, would remain unaffected, that we single-handedly managed to alter the surface of the world to a point of no return. The child in me wept with full tears for several minutes while my adult self felt lucky for not having anyone seated next to me.

Right after I arrived in Melbourne on Sunday, I went to the closing night of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival to listen to Chick Corea and Gary Burton. It was full house; several hundred people had come to enjoy what I (metaphorically ?) think to be an emergent property of the slavery system. I wondered if any beauty would eventually emerge from the corrupt systems of our society too, nevertheless, neither the jazz nor this thought helped me yet to recover from the shadowland I sank into. Maybe it’s time to add grieving to Meadows’ list; if we’re going to experience it increasingly more, it makes sense to at least frame it in an empowering way, i.e. as a tool.

“Self-centred” strategies to facilitate collaboration in research groups

I am a little bit drained as a result of having to go through several learning curves some of which have been steep and “lonely” since I started to work on a new project at a new workplace in a new country. Therefore I decided to stop; stop and reflect on my thoughts and feelings about this “initiation” process. I have three other blog posts I’m working on but this seems to be the most pressing one to “blurt out”.

System innovation, if not reduced to new technologies and organisational models which will accommodate them, is closely related to the “self”. Self both as “collective self” of humanity and how it relates to whatever is not perceived as humanity but also as individual self which is essentially the most important “operational level” for intervention. Us academics, those who’re most abundant in quantity at least, don’t talk about “self” much, in fact we don’t talk about it ever. If we have a “voice”, it’s raised in the passive form in writing, or referred to as “we” even if “I” is the sole author.

I reject this “delegitimisation”. I am is I am (although at times and for poetical reasons “I is an other” too) and I do bring values, a worldview, a vision and a knowledge base into my work which is bound and limited by my intellectual depth. As I explicitly state in some of my online profiles, “I am a researcher with a change agenda”. On the other hand, I am not solely a researcher; I am also a person proudly “owning” other identity signifiers such as “photographer”, “facilitator”, “friend”, “wanna be potter”, etc. When I do work, it’s the work of my life; there’s a continuum of but not a seperation between the distinguishable signifiers of my identity, which is ever evolving, developing, transforming. When I “friend” someone (I use friend in the grammatically non-existing verb form) it is from a position of “I want to make this world a better place by my thoughts, feelings and actions”. When I research I operate from the exact same position. Techne and telos have never been mutually exclusive although treated increasingly as such throughout Western intellectual and technological development. If a day came in which I acted from a different values set in my personal life than I did in my professional life (boundaries of which are obscure but “forced upon” me) I wouldn’t be able to find reasons to continue the work I do; for me “the work” is a whole.

In this regard, I find the culture of academia and government especially excruciating as they enforce “politics” onto people that they don’t necessarily own themselves in rather disempowering ways. For example, I am being forced to “compete” against my colleagues so that when the day of promotion applications come, I can be the one who gets it, or, in the next round of funding my application is the “winner”. I find this to be a patriarchal model for acknowledging accomplishment; my feminine instincts know that collaboration is in fact more effective and beneficial for the whole community but especially for those “emergent” elements; i.e. children, young researchers, niche innovations, etc., which are essentially “the future”.

In order to address the challenge that is created by traditional, harshly competitive academic culture in a project that requires radical collaboration both academically but also with a wide spectrum of present -i.e. those who will make decisions and create new systems- and future -i.e. those who will be influenced by those decisions and created systems- stakeholders, I am trying to tap into my facilitation skills. Facilitation is all about helping groups to achieve their goals. The keyword here is “group”; for facilitation to work, there needs to be a “group”, even if in “draft” form; i.e. a willingness of individuals involved to become part of a “group”, to collaborate, to co-create. In trying to do so, I hit my head against walls of personalities and hierarchies that are all created in an old paradigm that we’re in fact trying to replace in “system innovation” in broadest sense. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental learnings of my facilitation training was that “facilitating self” before even attempting to facilitate others is essential for generating fruitful collaboration and designing powerful, generative conversations. A facilitator who’s not “present” to the group for this or that reason is an ineffective facilitator. What will I do to facilitate myself, i.e. to become and remain present to myself then?

Here’re some quick mid-course resolutions:

1. I will stay true to myself – I will protect my values regardless of what the systems I have to operate in impose upon me. This involves modelling the behaviour I’d like to see emerge in my research team: never compete, never social-poach, never blame, never scapegoat, help others achieve their individual goals and demonstrate how this can be done by holding “running a successful project” as a group purpose. I will always empathise and exercise compassion when I relate to members of my research team, my colleagues, and everyone else who participate in the project in some capacity;

2. I will question – Regardless of the hierarchies forced upon me I will question the integrity of behaviour demonstrated and validity of theoretical/methodological frameworks “imposed” by those who’re in power positions. In short, I will have no fear of being seen as “apolitical” at times and “loud” at others;

3. I will transform – I will remain open to challenges to the project, its epistemological/political/theoretical/methodological groundings as a means of carrying the project “forward” in intellectual depth as well as practical relevance;

4. I will mentor and seek for mentoring – I will keep on sharing my experiences, knowledge, insights with researchers/colleagues/peers without fear of losing “ownership”; I do not own anything I know or am capable of. I owe all my knowledge, skills as well as “unique” ideas to everyone else who intellectually “touched” me including my students. I will also keep on seeking mentoring in places that are available for me. I will not pretend that I know everything and can be anything. This will also help me being patient with and kind to myself.

In order to achieve these, here’re some practical things I will do:

1. I will design and facilitate processes to form, develop and perform a collaborative research team. I’ll be ever inviting but not forcing upon “participation”. I will seek for alternative structures, systems, platforms to achieve collaboration and will not assume validity of only one form. This will also enable me to learn and develop as a facilitator. I may assign for next level of my facilitation training; i.e. get into a one-to-one coaching contract with my trainers (I need to think about this more);

2. I will stop not expressing myself due to any kind of fear rising from “professional” worries including impostor syndrome and losing “intellectual property”. I will write in my blog more often as a way of sharing and interacting without furious editing of content. I will also publish academically all those papers waiting in my folder because they’re just not yet “perfect”. There’s a need for scholarly dialogue now more than ever.

3. I will exercise good communication skills; listen attentively and respond to every point. Just because majority of people have poor listening/conversational skills does not create an excuse for me to follow suit;

4. I will meditate and create opportunities to connect with nature despite access is not as readily available as it was in New Zealand. There’s nothing more grounding for me than interacting with the elements in their pure(st possible) form. I will also reflect on nature of “nature” and what it means in regards to “system innovation”. I will change my views if any refreshing insight emerges. I will actively try to hold conversations about this.

5. I will reengage with photography or find another creative outlet which feels right to shift from my mind to my whole body; best is if I make something with my hands and find “flow” in such engagement. Mind is an important asset for a researcher, nevertheless, is also a trap for the spirit.

6. I will put more effort in developing my social circle in Melbourne. I will “set myself on fire and find those who fan my flames”. People are crucial for intellectual and creative development but also for “feeling at home”.

7. I will also put more effort in maintaining and developing my international research network. I will try to collaborate with those whose work influence mine.

8. I will know who to let to go of and when to let go. Not all seeds will flower and sometimes a rock drowns all “potential” of a seed. I will accept when I fail and I’ll try to “fail better” next time. 🙂

9. I will bring “lightness” into my interactions and I will not take myself too seriously.

How is research like cooking: A semi-serious introduction to transdisciplinarity

I’m writing this at the end of a very tiring week, on a Friday evening (although I might post it later). This week has seen accomplishment of the first major milestone of our research project. We ran our first visioning workshop in Melbourne thanks to generous time, mind, heart and spirit commitment of sixty plus participants. As a result, currently my mind is occupied with questions of how we will analyse and synthesise the enormous amount of amorphous data collected, how the research team will collaborate and how we will achieve integration of knowledge at meta level. Then I cannot help but wonder if we will really achieve all of these. While my limbs are carrying out daily routines such as walking, carrying stuff, opening and closing doors, pulling my rebellious hair away from in front and sometimes out of my eyes etc. the processor at the dingy corridors darkened by my grey matter is constantly revisiting theories, constructs, models and tools of transdisciplinarity. This has reached to such an extreme level that I caught myself pondering about the similarities between cooking and transdisciplinary research. A chuckle followed this blissful and rare moment of “becoming present to myself” which was then “contaminated” with inspiration to write a blog post about this. Since I don’t get very frequently inspired to write casually in a language I wasn’t “born within” -because my use is always imprecise, I never can attend to subtleties in meaning therefore it’s often either blunt or vague and my writing never “flows” naturally as it does when I use my first language- I thought I should “seize this moment”. So here I am, embarking on a big ordeal only to write a fun post about basics of transdisciplinarity. (Side note: For those who’d like to read about the relationship between language and thought I strongly recommend John Dewey’s book “How we think”, Chapter 13).

Forced analogy has always been one of my favourite creative thinking and argumentation methods. I know I’m not alone in this; a whole generation of post-modern designers used forced analogy to create enormous amounts of fun rubbish for example. But I argue that in fact the relationship between cooking and transdisciplinary research is not a “forced” analogy; the relationship on the contrary is direct because both activities reflect the very human nature. Humans make sense of the world by synthesizing (available) data as a whole which is collected through sensory organs as well as via intuition and instinct and filtered through highly subjective value judgments of all sorts. Sense making is a whole-person process mediating between the physical reality and our subjective interpretation of it (easy to guess I’m a constructivist, well, a meta-constructivist in fact. I might explain this in another post or not-no promises). At some point in human history though, when our knowledge about physical, chemical and biological phenomena was much more limited than today, we developed a particular approach to systematic inquiry which required studying parts of whole systems in isolation and ignoring the systems themselves to a large extent. Although Goethe proposed an alternative approach which he then most notably used in his Theory of Colours, it never became as popular as his always-in-agony Werther up until sustainability and complex system researchers looked for alternatives to the dominant reductionist paradigm of scientific inquiry to be able to account for interrelationships between parts as well as our subjective experience with the systems we interact with let it be a technological artefact or a whole regional habitat. This search found resonance in the rise and wider acceptance of transdisciplinary research. To increase general knowledge on precursors or complementaries of transdisciplinarity I recommend investigating mode 2 science and post-normal science. All of these are essentially responses to insufficiency of generating valid and useful knowledge through reductionist uses of scientific inquiry.

Transdisciplinary research is one valid approach to research among many others and cooking is one valid approach to preparing food among many. Both have appropriate and inappropriate uses and are suitable only for particular types of materials. Cooking makes certain food more digestible for humans so does transdisciplinary research makes wicked problems (earliest mention of the term was by Rittel and Webber (1973); ever since then loved, used and abused by designers, futures thinkers, sustainability enthusiasts and recently by all terminology fashionistas) easier to deal with. Cooking, if done inappropriately may make food toxic or result in food losing some of its nutritional value. Transdisciplinary research if done inappropriately can result in misinterpretation of valuable data or, worsening of the problem tried to be addressed. Nevertheless, the only way to assess “appropriateness” of both cooking and transdisciplinary research is by doing and reflecting on the outcome; although past experience with cooking and/or research methods can be helpful, each wicked problem as well as each culinary journey is unique requiring its special needs and “emergent properties” to be attended to by the cook/researcher.

One thing that starkly contrasts between transdisciplinary research and cooking is the most effective number of people involved in the research or cooking project. In transdisciplinary research, theoretically, the most effective number of researchers is equal to the number of distinguishable expertise domains related to the problem as long as these researchers are able to integrate knowledge. Transdisciplinary research also welcomes, in fact requires non-expert input into the research process. In cooking however, it is the opposite: The fewer the number of cooks, the more effectively and efficiently a dish is prepared and encounters of random hands with the dish being cooked is taken as unwelcome, in extreme cases, dangerous, as the potential contamination may be fatal. At this point I’d like to address a potential objection of those who love company in the kitchen; company in the kitchen is ok, in fact if the space isn’t too small, even desired. But company is not interference. Also, helpers are always welcome in the kitchen to run between the fridge and the pan or chop vegetables the same way research assistants are in the field, office or lab as “research hands”. Subordinate work is not interference either. Every now and then the kitchen helper or research assistant will have a spark of insight or a bright idea that he/she has to share with you and secretly desire appreciation. In that case they’re walking on a fine line of adding more brilliance to your work for which you will be credited or risking to be overbearing and perceived as a threat. No cook’s or researcher’s ego will allow such an uncomfortable moment to linger; the helper in either case will be better off by making a move to the “low-key” corner or he/she will have to bear the circumstances. Then of course there’s the “persistent couple” who argue they share the burden or pleasure of cooking depending on how far advanced they’re in their coupleship: “I make the soup, Jarjar makes the dessert. What’s wrong with that?” This simultaneous soup-making dessert-making covers the case of “company in the kitchen” but goes beyond as the company is also a co-cook. Collaboration in this case undeniably exists but the nature of it cannot be compared to the nature of collaboration in transdisciplinary research which results in “transcending” of disciplines.

What is transcendence of disciplines? Transdisciplinary research requires continuous self-inquiry and a willingness to compromise from the epistemological position one adheres to so that knowledge can be integrated and a soupdessert can be created to address the problem of hunger with a miraculously cheap yet nutritionally rich type of food which can also easily travel through zones of political conflict as some significant amount of hunger is not due to scarcity but access. When Lea makes the soup and Jarjar makes the dessert and so on, they collaborate towards completion of a whole course but they do not co-create something new together by transforming the materials, the cooking methods, the meaning of cooking as well as their respective expertise in soup and dessert making. They are also not interested in addressing a problem beyond meeting their basic human need of nutrition with a bit of indulgence. The research approaches comparable to this simultaneous co-cooking are multi-disciplinarity or pluri-disciplinarity. For a good account of different prefixes highly handsome yet always a bachelor disciplinarity can be burdened with and what on earth they might mean I strongly recommend having a look at Max-Neef (2005). He might have well saved me from potential psychosis triggered by extreme anxiety associated with not being able to make sense of anything in the highly complex, highly uncertain, highly Mexican-soap-opera world of PhD years even in the existence of numerous attempts of scholars to clarify the pseudo-terminologies they once created in shower publication after publication. Max-Neef clean cuts it; he’s noble, above all and doesn’t get into endless semantic arguments. (Max-Neef is more notably known for proposing a sophisticated alternative to Maslow’s white-male-first-world-biased needs theory which unfortunately still contaminates design and marketing students’ naïve understanding of the world as Teletubbie Land.) Therefore, I use Max-Neef’s typology of disciplinarities whenever I need to, haven’t encountered any major drama because of this so far and recommend my strategy of ignoring anyone who’s trying to sneakily pull you into rhetoric about this. If we were to mull over definitions forever, we might have improved our track record but not the world itself, which is essentially what each and every transdisciplinary researcher is aspiring to. In fact, transdisciplinarity is all about having an agenda of change and transforming a problem domain (Wickson, Carew & Russell, 2006; Pohl & Hirsch Hadorn, 2007; Späth, 2008; Zierhofer & Burger, 2007).

Well, cooking of course is a process of “transcendence” too for what’s being cooked if not alchemy altogether and its primary agenda of change is transforming hunger into well-being through supply of nutrients our body needs. A singular change agenda, yet not one to be sneezed at as hunger is also a socially relevant complex real life problem. Addressing socially relevant complex real life problems is in fact among the most distinguishing characteristics of transdisciplinary research (Bergmann et al., 2005; Wickson et al., 2006; Zierhofer & Burger, 2007). Therefore, if Lea and Jarjar had aimed at creating a soupdessert to address world hunger instead of preparing a full course dinner for their own need fulfillment and enjoyment by giving up on preconceived ideas about what the output of their cooking will be, only then they could have been likened to transdisciplinary researchers who are also subject to transformation as the problem area they intervene in and the disciplines they individually represent transforms (Dickens, 2003).

In this post I tried to explain some basics of transdisciplinary research using cooking as a playful analogy. I may have clarified confusions or may have added more to the heavy feeling associated with “trying to make sense of it all”. Nevertheless, this is why we all love scholarly work; the little moments of insight which follow long periods of frustrated confusion. But for the purpose of service, here’re some quick points to take away.

Transdisciplinary research aims to solve complex and multi-dimensional real-life problems.
Collaboration and coordination is a pre-requisite for transdisciplinary research since real-world problems cannot be framed in mono-disciplines.
In transdisciplinary research researchers contribute to the solution of the identified real-life problem.
In transdisciplinary research researchers “own” the problem and have a transformation agenda in addressing it.
In transdisciplinary research, there are different types or dimensions of knowledge integration. First of them is the integration of different epistemologies of different disciplines. The second type of integration is integration of scientific and practical knowledge.

I would like to write another post about integration of knowledge in transdisciplinary research as this cannot be effectively covered in this post and requires a dedicated one. Another topic rather important is about evaluation and quality of transdisciplinary research as transdisciplinary research cannot be assessed referring to traditional quality criteria which applies to academic work. Time will tell if inspiration will strike me again anytime soon.

I’d like to finish this post by a favorite quote from one of the most memorable characters of literary history as he shares the ultimate insight of a scholar:

“Now I have studied philosophy, medicine and the law, and unfortunately, theology, wearily sweating, yet I stand now, poor fool, no wiser than I was before; I am called Master, even Doctor, and for these last ten years have led my students by the nose–up, down, crosswise and crooked. Now I see that we know nothing, finally.”

-Faust

References I used in this post:

Bergmann, Matthias, Brohmann, Bettina, Hoffman, Esther, Loibl, M. Céline, Rehaag, Regine, Schramm, Engelbert, & Voß, Jan-Peter. (2005). Quality Criteria of Transdisciplinary Research. A Guide for the Formative Evaluation of Research Projects. ISOE-Studientexte, No 13 / English Version, Frankfurt am Main. .

Dickens, P. (2003). Changing our environment, changing ourselves: Critical realism and transdisciplinary research. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 28(2), 95-105.

Cundill, G. N. R., Fabricius, C., & Marti, N. (2005). Foghorns to the future: Using knowledge and transdisciplinarity to navigate complex systems. Ecology and Society, 10(2).

Max-Neef, Manfred A. (2005). Foundations of transdisciplinarity. Ecological Economics, 53(1), 5-16.

Pohl, Christian, & Hirsch Hadorn, Gertrude. (2007). Principles for Designing Transdisciplinary Research: Proposed by the Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences (A. B. Zimmermann, Trans.). Munich: Oekom Verlag.

Rittel, Horst W. J., & Webber, Melvin M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155-169.

Späth, P. (2008). Learning ex-post: Towards a simple method and set of questions for the self-evaluation of transdisciplinary research. GAIA, 17(2), 224-232.

Wickson, F., Carew, A. L., & Russell, A. W. (2006). Transdisciplinary research: characteristics, quandaries and quality. Futures, 38(9), 1046-1059.

Zierhofer, W., & Burger, P. (2007). (Transdisciplinary research – A distinct mode of knowledge production? Problem-orientation, knowledge integration and participation in transdisciplinary research projects). GAIA, 16(1), 29-34.

Additional references not cited here but contributed significantly to my understanding of transdisciplinary research:

Brown, Valerie A., Harris, John A., & Russell, Jacqueline Y. (Eds.). (2010). Tackling wicked problems through the transdisciplinary imagination London, Washington, DC: Earthscan.

Burger, P, & Kamber, R. (2003). Cognitive Integration in Transdisciplinary Science: Knowledge as a Key Notion. Issues in Integrative Studies, 21, 43-73.

Carew, Anna L., & Wickson, Fern. (2010). The TD Wheel: A heuristic to shape, support and evaluate transdisciplinary research. Futures, 42(10), 1146-1155.

Cundill, G. N. R., Fabricius, C., & Marti, N. (2005). Foghorns to the future: Using knowledge and transdisciplinarity to navigate complex systems. Ecology and Society, 10(2).

Hirsch Hadorn, Gertrude , Biber-Klemm, Susette, Grossenbacher-Mansuy, Walter, Hoffmann-Riem, Holger, Joye, Dominique, Pohl, Christian, . . . Zemp, Elisabeth. (2008). The Emergence of Transdisciplinarity as a Form of Research In G. Hirsch Hadorn, S. Biber-Klemm, W. Grossenbacher-Mansuy, H. Hoffmann-Riem, D. Joye, C. Pohl, U. Wiesmann & E. Zemp (Eds.), Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research (pp. 19-39). Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media B.V.

Jantsch, Erich. (1972). Inter- and Transdisciplinary University: A Systems Approach to Education and Innovation Higher Education, 1(1), 7-37.

Lawrence, R. J., & Després, C. (2004). Futures of Transdisciplinarity. Futures, 36(4), 397-405.

Loibl, M. C. (2006). Integrating Perspectives in the Practice of Transdisciplinary Research. In J.-P. Voß, D. Bauknecht & R. Kemp (Eds.), Reflexive governance for sustainable development (pp. 294-309). Cheltenham, Glos, UK ; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Mobjörk, Malin. (2010). Consulting versus participatory transdisciplinarity: A refined classification of transdisciplinary research. Futures, 42(8), 866-873. doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2010.03.003

Montuori, Alfonso. (2010). Transdisciplinarity and Creative Inquiry in Transformative Education: Researching the Research Degree. In M. Maldonato & R. Pietrobon (Eds.), Research on scientific research. (pp. 110-135). Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

Nicolescu, Basarab. (2002). Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (K.-C. Voss, Trans.). New York: State University of New York Press.

Russell, A. W., Wickson, F., & Carew, A. L. (2008). Transdisciplinarity: Context, contradictions and capacity. Futures, 40(5), 460-472.

Thompson Klein, Julie. (2004). Prospects for transdisciplinarity. Futures, 36(4), 515-526.

Walter, A. I., Helgenberger, S., Wiek, A., & Scholz, R. W. (2007). Measuring societal effects of transdisciplinary research projects: Design and application of an evaluation method. Evaluation and Program Planning, 30(4), 325-338.

Sailing to New Oceans

I am sailing to new oceans… In fact, I am moving onto “city level” challenges.

I have resigned from my job at Auckland University of Technology where I taught design and innovation for sustainability and design futures across three programs (Design Major, Master of Design and Product Design) in two faculties (Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies and Faculty of Business and Law) as of Friday August 9th. I am moving to Melbourne, Australia to take up a role as a researcher at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) of University of Melbourne. The project I will be working for at VEIL aims to explore and articulate visions, scenarios and policy pathways for a low carbon built environment in some Australian cities. I am very excited with the prospect of working in a project which looks at systems (i.e. cities) larger than what I’ve focused on so far (i.e. organisations and production-consumption systems). This will enable opportunities for me to use and expand my knowledge on system innovations, design futures and transdisciplinary research. I am also very excited that the project leader is Prof. Chris Ryan whose work I’ve been following for thirteen years. Maybe I died and now I’m in researchers’ heaven.