What’s new in the first in four years in-person edition of our transdisciplinary course
This is a short story that describes new elements we introduced in the first in-person since 2020 edition of our course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations”. As we shared in this series earlier, in 2021 the course was redesigned to be run remotely with the use of Zoom and Miro as main spaces for interactions. In 2022, we launched its remote edition for the second time, building upon the experience from the previous year but also introducing some new elements. Due to various factors, in 2023 the course was put on hold. Finally, in January-March 2024, we were happy to offer its in-person edition again. This was an interesting and stimulating journey with a number of new elements that emerged in the course based on the previous in-person and remote editions, but also because of new people been involved in running it and new collaborations formed around it.
What’s new?
This is going to be a brief summary of new elements we tried out in the course for the first time with reflections on how they worked out.
Hybrid spaces — Miro in a classroom
After using Miro as an essential space for interactions during the two online editions, we saw a lot of benefits of introducing it again this year. Particularly, it was important as a shared space to create continuity and enable process documentation, but also for facilitating brainstorming and organising thoughts, and for different groups to see each other progress. With this in mind, we suggested to this year's students to use a shared Miro space in the classroom during the seminars and private Miro spaces for collaborations in their project groups. This was much appreciated, many students reflected on the usefulness of Miro and the value of learning it in this course for their future projects and work.
What was perhaps somewhat affected by the use of Miro in the classroom, is the active use of spaces by students. With Miro, laptops became rather central during group exercises and we observed less movement and notetaking on whiteboards or posters. We were also worried about how the use of Miro would affect group dynamics and discussions during the seminars. Some students reflected that they would prefer using post-its, paper, and pens instead, to not be distracted by the need to put something in a digital space during discussions. One interesting reflection was connected to the possibility of getting attention to your thoughts that appeared to be much more limited with Miro. While the student responses on the use of Miro in a hybrid mode were mostly positive, in the future, it will be important to explore how to make it less distracting for real-life interactions in a classroom.
This year societal partners — Stockholm municipality
This year we partnered with Stockholm municipality to connect group projects to their ambitious work on climate-neutrality in the city. The municipality brought a transition challenge framed around a newly established (to be launched at the end of 2024) zero-emission zone (ZEZ) in the city center, which is also connected to a new ‘system demonstrator’ SnabbSam project. Representatives of the municipality highlighted many aspects they want to address with this initiative giving space for students to reflect and choose what they find most interesting to focus on in their projects.
(Re)framing of challenges
In this year's edition, we made sure to allocate time and encourage the groups to (re)frame the initial problem presented by the municipality. This led to the emergence of many interesting framings as the focus of project work — for example, explorations at the intersection of mobility system and consumption; critical perspective on the possibility of scaling the current zero-emission zone and reaching climate goals for the entire city; interest in social sustainability and vibrant community, as well as finding a way towards a new economy based on the ideas of sharing and circularity. As one student reflected, it was surprising for them to see how diverse the new framings were, despite all groups being exposed to the same initial information and following the same process.
Capitalising on proximity and insights from Urban Planning
Thanks to this year's brilliant teaching assistant of the course Elpida Stratopoulou, we’ve got a chance to strengthen the content with methods from Urban Planning. This considerably improved the approaches taken by students when doing site visits in ZEZ. For example, they’ve got advice on how to plan and do observations, making sure to visit ZEZ several times at different times of the day and on different days of the week. Elpida also showed examples of how notes can be taken and presented, and how the collected information can be analysed and put on a map. This was a valuable contribution to the method toolbox we introduce in this course which will hopefully stay in the future.
Connected to this, an advantage of this year’s edition was the proximity of the chosen focus area and the municipality as a whole. As KTH is located in the middle of Stockholm, many students found it easy to visit the inner city many times and interact with local actors on the site. In comparison with the course edition in 2022, when we collaborated with Skellefteå municipality in the North of Sweden, this year’s experience was quite different. While the 2022 edition proved it possible to have an interesting and efficient collaboration remotely, this year, we gained a lot of benefits from the proximity and local collaborations.
Guest workshop by ALC — listening channels
This year, we were happy to host a guest workshop by two representatives of the Agirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC) — an international consultancy based in the Basque Country that has many years of experience with community transformation and social innovations. During their guest workshop, two representatives of ALC — Julia Martinez and Laura Sanz Corada — presented the ALC approach to fostering social listening platforms in different contexts. The concept of ‘listening channels’ stuck in the course with many groups being inspired by it during their project work. Another method from the ALC toolbox — the use of ‘personas’ developed based on in-depth ethnographic studies was also of great interest to the students. With the limited time, not many groups managed to interact with the local community to the extent of being able to develop personas based on the ALC approach, but some tried to do so and at least imagined what kind of personas can be found in ZEZ.
Portfolio of experiments in the mPB toolbox
In the course, we introduce the mPB toolbox for addressing complex sustainability transition challenges. Already for several years, we have been working to update the two last modules of the toolbox — Action Plan and Follow-ups — which we find to be somewhat outdated considering the developments in the transition theory and the growing focus on the importance of experimentation for steering transitions. Already in 2021, we introduced a new module “Design of Experiments” instead of the Action Plan. This year, we further worked on its toolbox and included in it the Experiment design canvas that was timely shared on social media by Sam Rye. This was a beneficial tool, which some groups applied or used for inspiration when asked to design a portfolio of 5 interconnected experiments in line with the ideas they developed for Stockholm municipality. The concept of ‘portfolio’ is still challenging to introduce within the course, as it comes at the very end and we lack time to present it properly. However, the ideas from the transformative portfolio approach slowly combine with the mPB toolbox and in the future, this might lead to a merged new toolbox to be developed.
Creative storytelling — connecting present, past, and future
This was another great and somewhat unexpected novelty that Elpida brought to the course. Based on her personal interest in narratives and storytelling, she developed a workshop for students in which she presented possible moves they could use to connect past, present, and future in their final presentations. Sketching of storyboards was a practical element of the workshop.
Use of AI for visualisation of desirable futures & solutions
This year we suggested our students try out AI tools for image generation to visualise their ideas for the future. This was inspired by the work of such innovative startups as UrbanistAI. Interestingly, initially, many students were quite skeptical about the use of AI tools. However, in the end, several groups successfully used them to create visuals of the future they developed for Stockholm municipality. The free versions of many AI tools for image generation are quite limited which didn’t allow us to explore their full potential in the context of the course. The students also struggled to buttle ‘stereotypes’ that AI embeds in any picture it generates. We hope this was a useful learning in itself.
Emotions wheel
The emotions wheel we introduced in the course during the pandemic proved to be a useful tool during the in-person edition too. Every Friday we asked students to put a dot on the ‘Emotion wheel’ template that was placed on the shared Miro space to indicate what emotion they experience in connection to their project work right now. We didn’t have a very good idea of how useful this was to the groups till the very end when we read in the students’ reflections that they appreciated the technique and some even used it to follow up on its outcomes in their groups, discussing why their group mates experience certain emotions.
Facilitation techniques that proved to work well again
This year we repeated many of the facilitation approaches we developed with Hayley Ho and Hanna Eggestrand in 2020 when running the course in class, the last time before the pandemic. It was pleasant to see that these approaches work pretty well — which can be seen as a ‘proof of concept’ that our facilitation techniques help to promote active, collaborative and reflexive learning.
Similarly to the previous years, we kept on promoting interactions across groups during the Interim critique and on a few other occasions. This was much appreciated by students who noted the collaborative rather than competitive nature of the course. The students also liked the possibility of seeing other groups progress on the shared Miro space and found it very motivating and learning-rich to observe how different groups performed during the Interim and Final presentations.
This year students
This year, we were happy to welcome yet another bunch of very smart and motivated students from different master's programs in KTH and even one PhD student! They came from different cultural and educational backgrounds which enriched the course with a variety of ideas from different perspectives. We had two in-depth feedback sessions with student representatives that revealed several possibilities to develop the course further. One important outcome is the importance of rethinking how the course is graded and providing even more possibilities for students to focus on learnings that naturally emerge in the process of exploration. Overall, this year student representatives have shown great commitment to help us make the course even better in the future, something we appreciate a lot.
‘Följeforskare’ within the course
Another experimental part of this year’s edition was having a master's student, Sigrid Brydolf, who joined the course as an ‘accompanying researcher’ (in Swedish ‘följeforskare’) to follow the project groups focusing on group dynamics in interdisciplinary teams. By closely following several project groups and interviewing students individually, she gained insights into the internal processes of group work, something we only touched upon before in the context of this course. Sigrid’s research also led to a very interesting ‘Collaborations workshop’ organised as a follow-up to the course. We are very much looking forward for her master thesis to be published this summer which will contain detailed findings of her study and reflections on how to influence group dynamics.
What’s next?
This year’s edition of the TASI course proved that the course structure and approaches we use to run it work pretty well. It also brought new insights on how to develop the course further. One aspect that reemerged in the discussions with the student representatives and in the course feedback questionnaire is a mismatch between the process-focused nature of the course and its mostly outcomes-based grading approach. Thus, from a process-based perspective, learnings from the process and exploration are central. At the same time, in the grading, a big role is given to the quality of a final report which is largely outcomes-oriented. Finding a better balance between the two would be very important to further strengthen the course and clarify the message it sends about what is valued in transdisciplinary processes in real life. And this is not an easy issue to address. A final report has positive sides to it as it pushes students to put all bits and pieces together and see how different modules of the mPB contribute to addressing sustainability transition challenges. And in real-life problem-solving, outcomes are certainly important. We will keep on exploring this issue with one idea developed so far was to introduce a ‘project diary’ with a focus on the documentation of learnings from the process.
While the course is developing well, providing a space for learning and gaining experience in transdisciplinary collaborations for its students, the future of it doesn’t look very shiny. With the ever-shrinking budget (not because of a smaller number of students, but due to the factors related to the budget allocation for education) it is getting more and more difficult to ensure that we can put enough time into running it. We will keep on exploring possibilities to secure essential features of the course in the future and even develop it further, though the trend of the last five years was that making this has been getting more and more challenging.
