Proposing a Case Study Combining Transdisciplinary and Data-Centered Methods for Understanding Complex Problems in an Educational Context

In this opinion piece we argue for combining data-centered hackathons with transdisciplinarity to better understand wicked problems such as food insecurity. Hackathons represent unique opportunities for answering previously identified and consequently well-defined questions in the context of high-dimensional data. However, the possibilities for providing participants with extensive and potentially quintessential background knowledge and for enabling them to develop a shared understanding of the explicit and implicit meanings of variables associated with the respective problem are limited. Thus, the inherently difficult step of deriving realistic strategic implications from provided or otherwise available data is further aggravated. In the context of this evident void, a format combining transdisciplinary and data-driven approaches could represent a promising approach. Thereby, quantitative and preferably unbiased and qualitative, concept-centered analyses could be paralleled, which would enable the synergistic and incremental understanding of both the relationships between model variables and the meaning of those variables themselves. Furthermore, transdisciplinary approaches are fundamentally stakeholder-focused. The aforementioned approach not only could thus support the development of strategic recommendations concerning the chosen problem, but also facilitates stakeholder engagement, which is central to ensuring that proposed strategies are realistic, implementable, and accepted. Food insecurity represents a prime example of a complex, multidimensional problem of extreme urgency. Besides the availability of a myriad of data relating to several aspects of food insecurity, including data on transport networks, food policy decisions, and climate change, grasping the phenomenon of food insecurity in its entirety remains challenging. Given its relevance and <target target-type="page-num" id="p-71"/>complexity and the amount of related data available, food insecurity represents an ideal challenge for exploring the feasibility of combining data-driven and transdisciplinary approaches. Therefore, during the 2018‐2019 academic year, a group of students organized a hackathon around food insecurity and drew inspiration from that hackathon to write a challenge document to be taken up during the ‘Transdisciplinary Insights’ Honours Programme of the 2019‐2020 academic year.