Politics of Nature: The board game

Here we introduce the board game Politics of Nature, or PoN as it is now known. Inspired by the work of Bruno Latour, PoN offers an alternative take on co-existence by implementing a flat political ontology in a gamified meeting protocol. PoN does not suggest that humans have no special abilities, only that humans at the outset, are bestowed with no more rights than other kinds of beings. Designed to enable people of all walks of life to playfully unpack and resolve controversies, PoN provides a space where beings can have their existence renegotiated. The aim of PoN is to play as a team to explore and decide on potential good common worlds in which more indispensable beings can exist than if the status quo is continued. By playing PoN iteratively through rounds, each having four stages, the players gradually construct PoN - a planet mirroring ‘real worlds’. The four stages provide a novel combination of identification, representation, meditation, prioritization, mapping, individual and group ideation, proposal formulation, and decision-making; only to ask the players to challenge and change PoN to fit their requirements after each round. What follows is taken directly from the manual.

Diagrams of Intensity: Visualising the Sensibilities of Transdisciplinary Practice

One of the challenges to an increased rationalism within educational discourse has been a rethinking of mind-body relations. While there has been considerable discussion around what is implicated through the engagement of physical and theoretical sites of knowing, methodological difficulties related to how its resultant data might be meaningfully evidenced remain. Based on fieldwork conducted on a post-qualitative approach to transdisciplinary practice the author provides an account of a visual research method developed specifically to illustrate non-verbal experiences of group ideation. Writing from the position of a creative practitioner and intimate insider, the author explores how this positionality supported the role of bodily knowing in her research and the ways in which bodily experience offered utility to this research endeavour. The author concludes with a reflection on visualisation as a method to capture non-cognitive data and areas indicated through felt data for further exploration.

Design Concept Structures in Massive Group Ideation

Empirical work in design science has highlighted that the process of ideation can significantly affect design outcome. Exploring the design space with both breadth and depth increases the likelihood of achieving better design outcomes. Furthermore, iteratively attempting to solve challenging design problems in large groups over a short time period may be more effective than protracted exploration by an isolated set of individuals. There remains a substantial opportunity to explore the structure of various design concept sets. In addition, many empirical studies cap analysis at sample sizes of less than one hundred individuals. This has provided substantial, though partial, models of the ideation space. This work explores one new territory in large scale ideation. Two conditions are evaluated. In the first condition, an ideation session was run with 2400 practicing designers and engineers from one organization. In the second condition 1000 individuals ideate on the same problem in a completely distributed environment and without awareness of each other. We compare properties of solution sets produced by each of these groups and activities. Analytical tools from network modeling theory are applied as well as traditional ideation metrics such as concept binning with saturation analysis. Structural network modeling is applied to evaluate the interconnectivity of design concepts. This is a strictly quantitative, and at the same time graphically expressive, means to evaluate the diversity of a design solution set. Observations indicate that the group condition approached saturation of distinct categories more rapidly than the individual, distributed condition. The total number of solution categories developed in the group condition was also higher. Additionally, individuals generally provided concepts across a greater number of solution categories in the group condition. The indication for design practice is that groups of just under forty individuals would provide category saturation within group ideation for a system level design, while distributed individuals may provide additional concept differentiation. This evidence can support development of more systematic ideation strategies. Furthermore, we provide an algorithmic approach for quantitative evaluation of variety in design solution sets using networking analysis techniques. These methods can be used in complex or wicked problems, and system development where the design space is vast.

Exploring the Use of Virtual World Technology for Idea-Generation Tasks

While the potential value of Virtual World Technologies (VWTs) lies in their promise to facilitate communication through new and novel forms of collaboration, there is a lack of prior research that examines how VWTs compare to other types of information and communication technologies (ICT) commonly used to support collaborative work. This study investigates the effects of VWTs on group ideation outcomes; specifically, it compares the use of Second Life to a chat environment for idea generation tasks. As hypothesized, groups using VWTs for an idea generation task generated significantly more unique ideas and enjoyed using the environment more than the chat environment. Contrary to our predictions, no significant difference between the two environments was observed for satisfaction, group cohesion, and social presence.