Bridging theory and practice of meaningful collaborations: beginning of our collaborative journey and preview of upcoming stories
By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza
Meaningful collaborations are often named to be an important enabler or necessary condition for addressing sustainability challenges. But what does this imply and how can this be translated into practice? How can we as designers, facilitators and participants of collaborative processes contribute in their development and spreading? Being involved in different roles (from participants to facilitators and designers) in various participatory activities aimed at triggering or steering sustainability transitions, we felt the need for a more systematic exploration of what meaningful collaborations are, what skills and attitudes they require, and what techniques and approaches can contribute into building meaningful collaborations for systems transformations.
Meeting for the first time in spring 2019 and spending together an intense and thought-provoking week at Almedalen, we started looking for opportunities to explore meaningful collaborations in a joint project or activity. We finally got an opportunity to work together in winter 2020 when collaborating to design the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” in KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
We began our collaboration shortly before the course started in January 2020, and had to develop shared practices for working together while running the course. Having the course as a context of research was motivating, as it came with the challenge of time pressure and responsibilities towards the learning developments of students. Aside from overcoming our own constraints of available time, we also had to address those which came from the academic perspective, such as the grading system and course timetable, of the students’ varied backgrounds, availability and motivation, and of the societal partners’ requirements.
The course concluded in the middle of March, a few days before Swedish authorities issued the work-from-home policy due to the COVID-19 pandemic and KTH moved into fully digital remote work. With this, our further work focused on the retrospective analysis of the course design had to be adapted to the new circumstances and moved into digital mode.
Preview of upcoming stories
Our collaboration began with the question of how to define and enable meaningful collaborations that link theory and practice. We had not collaborated before, and the course was the perfect context to combine our expertise and perspectives to develop methods by experimenting in practice. We consciously and constantly reflected on how our collaboration emerged and developed by allocating a time for reflections at the end of each meeting. We share our reflections and observations for setting up new meaningful collaborations in the first story of this series.
While retrospective analysis is considered a common practice in the areas of product and service design or software development, it is rarely carried out in a systematic way for university courses. When exploring approaches to conduct such an analysis on the course design, we developed two techniques: timeline mapping and reflections mapping. When experimenting with remote collaborative tools to support the development of this mapping, we found Miro to be the most suitable. We will describe the approaches we developed for the retrospective analysis in the second story.
As we were developing a university course, design of processes focused on learning became central in our collaboration. We found ourselves fully engaged in figuring out how we can better facilitate learning and development of skills important for transformative systems changes among the students. We found an exploratory attitude to learning crucial for such a context and realised that the ability to work in non-linear processes as a necessary competence for practical problem-solving. We will dedicate two stories (Story 3 and Story 4) to share facilitation techniques we developed to support collaborative learning and foster the skills for transformative changes.
In the course context, learning and collaboration of students when addressing the given transition challenge was happening, to a large extent, in their project groups. These learning processes in groups were central in understanding how our facilitation worked and how efficient it was in supporting the meaningful collaborations of others. However our insight into these was limited. In the final story of this series, we focus on the feedback loops and emerging alignments as important mechanisms of responsive design. We highlight the importance of a deeper understanding of group dynamics and alignment processes which are inherent in collaborative settings.
This publication series appeals to practitioners, educators, researchers, and active citizens involved in different roles in collaborative processes aimed at triggering systems transformations. By sharing our stories we would like to contribute to establishing good practices of initiating and facilitating participatory processes grounded in meaningful collaborations. We also hope to inspire new research questions and productive discussions about building capacities and skills of change agents for sustainability.
The first five stories in this publication series will be published during September-October 2020. Meanwhile we are engaged in new endeavours in the field of meaningful collaborations for transformative systems changes. We hope this will lead us and our collaborators to share more insightful stories in the future.
Before jumping to the stories, we would like to thank our amazing colleagues and students in the course who joined us on this journey. Without the creative and stimulating environment created by them, our reflections would not have had a chance to be developed and these stories would not have been told. Also thanks to Viable Cities Transition Lab who provided support and an opportunity for us and the students to collaborate during the course with a socially relevant sustainability challenge in Sweden.
About the Authors
Hayley Ho develops participatory processes and methodology to work with stakeholders from municipalities, industry and communities to address societal and sustainability issues. Hayley has worked for over 10 years in London and Hong Kong for international, local and start up companies on product and packaging, cultural and trend research, brand and marketing strategies, exhibitions and seminars, as well as initiatives to encourage conversations about ethnic cultures, craft, sustainability and creativity. Currently, Hayley works as a designer and researcher in the group Prototyping Societies at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.
Kateryna Pereverza is a researcher in the area of sustainability transitions and systems design. In her PhD thesis she advanced the modular Participatory backcasting, mPB as a framework for steering sustainability transitions. Kateryna has more than 10 years of experience of teaching backcasting for students and practitioners. She practices transdisciplinary and action research with a focus on collaborative and active learning among those involved. Currently, Kateryna is a postdoctoral researcher in Urban Analytics and Transition research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
