Responsive design for meaningful collaborations: feedback loops and emerging alignments
By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza
This story is the fifth in the series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”; it is also the final of the five stories focused on our collaboration around the course design in spring 2020. In this story we reflect on the importance of responsive design and share feedback mechanisms we used when designing the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations”. We emphasise a need to deepen knowledge of process designers and facilitators about group dynamics. At the same time, we suggest to think about design approaches which would explicitly consider that insights into in-group processes which facilitators and process designers can potentially have will always be limited.
In transdiscplinary and project-based courses, learning and collaboration of students is happening, to a large extent, in their project groups. These learning processes in groups are central for understanding how facilitation works and how efficient it is in supporting the meaningful collaborations of others. When designing the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” we followed a responsive approach based on different feedback mechanisms. We have also addressed the discrete nature of the course workflow and implemented facilitation techniques to support continuity and alignments between otherwise disconnected learning trajectories.
Discrete workflow of the course and multiple learning trajectories
During the course, students underwent their own parallel processes of learning and collaboration. The seminars were our main interaction points, and in their design we aimed to ensure a smooth connection between them. For example, by starting a new seminar with a wrap up of the previous one, or by bringing back outcomes achieved by groups in the preceding seminar and work done between seminars to be used in activities. The seminars were also connected by the use of facilitation techniques which continued over several seminars. For example, three seminars at the beginning (seminars System boundaries, Vision and Criteria Part 1 and Vision and Criteria Part 2) were connected by a role play.
However, the workflow of project work was much more complex. Student groups met between seminars to work on their projects and established their own communication channels to ensure flexible and continuous contact with each other. This resulted in the emergence of different trajectories for each of the eight project groups in parallel to the one we saw during the seminars. This also led to a different pace of work for each group, diversity of interpretations of the given transition challenge and of the mPB framework. Specific dynamics of each group became an essential part of the learning environment in the course.
Feedback loops and emerging alignments
When meeting with students during the seminars and supervision sessions, we quickly realised how much adaptation and flexibility is required to quickly grasp their framings and pace of project work to provide helpful feedback. The documentation of the work process which we introduced helped to some extent in providing a better picture of their different ways of thinking and approaches to problem-solving. Another approach we used to provide tailored feedback was to ask each group to prepare and write on the whiteboard three high priority questions they wanted to discuss in the coaching session. This helped to identify both common questions and those specific for each group, resulting in a more efficient coaching session before the final presentations.
In this transdisciplinary course, another layer of collaboration was connected to the interactions with societal partners from Järfälla municipality. Both ourselves and course students were engaged in communication with stakeholders of Järfälla mobility system to collect data and materials, and to get inspiration from various actors. In support of this, a study visit to Järfälla was organised. We ran a preparatory documentation exercise, as well as encouraged students to independently interview citizens, companies and researchers to enable developing visions and pathways relevant to the context.
The learning environment of the course evolved with time, leading to stronger alignment between the different parallel processes, and increased the quality of interactions between us and the students and across the project groups. At times, student processes mirrored ours as we introduced working practices that we had experimented with in our design meetings and then incorporated into the seminars. We noticed that over time students started to use more confidently some of the techniques suggested in the class without prompting. For example, facilitation techniques like individual brainstorming followed by clustering and discussing ideas in groups, use of post-its, drawing on large paper posters, and active use of spaces became regularly used by several groups both during the seminars and when meeting independently.
Feedback from students was regularly collected to ensure the relevance of facilitation techniques and to adjust the pace and scope of the seminars. We introduced feedback posters to collect suggestions and comments with the use of post-its during the interim critique and final presentation. We also asked students to communicate their suggestions and thoughts through the course evaluation questionnaire at the end of the course in the middle of March, and in an online questionnaire about the learning environment after the grading was completed at the end of April. We met with student representatives in the middle of the course and after the course ended to discuss specific in-depth questions raised by themselves and their peers. All these activities gave us important observations and insights to steer the course design, and which we will also further analyse to build a stronger ground for designing the course in the future.
Concluding reflections
The described techniques and feedback mechanisms proved helpful for designing the course, which is characterised by its discrete workflow and multiple learning and collaboration trajectories. However, the Process analysis workshop we organised as a part of the retrospective analysis of the course design revealed that our insight into group dynamics remained rather limited. This made us reflect on how we could potentially address this in future editions of the course.
One idea we came up with is to deepen our understanding of group dynamics and find approaches to be better informed about in-group processes and their main outcomes. A possible practical tool for this could be by introducing process documentation. For this, we would need to better understand what information about their internal processes project groups feel comfortable to share. It would also be important to make process documentation an integral part of the course by introducing it from the very beginning and connecting it to the deliverables expected in the course (for example, final project reports). However, we would have to design the course acknowledging that our insight into in-group processes will always be limited. Both due to time limitations of the course, and that there needs to be space for undocumented internal processes to create a trusting environment and for building of team spirit.
We would also like to build upon the emerging diversity of each group to enrich learning across project groups. This year we asked project groups to share the most interesting observations and reflections about their journeys when presenting their work at the final presentations. This resulted in an extremely interesting discussion about the nature of work in non-linear processes, physical and remote tools for continuous communication and collaboration, approaches for collecting process documentation and making processes more transparent, methods for collecting insights from stakeholders and analysing them, and much more. All such insights and learnings were beyond the topic of the course or the given transition challenge, and provided an opportunity to reflect about processes behind addressing transition challenges.
Concluding our series of five stories focused on the design and retrospective analysis of the “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” course in 2020, we are looking forward to opportunities to further explore and experiment with approaches, facilitation techniques, practices and attitudes which might be helpful for initiating and facilitating participatory processes grounded in meaningful collaborations. Such experimentation would also create opportunities for new stories to be written and shared.
This story is the fifth in the publication series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. Check the introductory story by which we launch the series and introduce included stories.
