Impact at UTS: Episode Five transcript – Breaking out of your research silo

Emma Lancaster:

The Impact at UTS podcast series is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research.

Martin Bliemel:

We are living in a rapidly changing world. Whether we like it or not, we’re facing increasingly global problems.

NEWS GRAB Barack Obama in ‘COP 21: Obama’s full speech at Paris conference’ on Euronews:

We are the first generation that feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

NEWS GRAB : Journalist Cathy Van Extel on ‘Science with Jonathan Webb: The ‘tipping point’ in Climate Change’ on ABC RN

From deepening droughts in Australia to soaring permafrost in the arctic.

NEWS GRAB : Hon Enele Sosene Sopoaga in ‘Climate Refugees From The Pacific Islands’ on  ABC Q&A

No single country can do it on its own.

NEWS GRAB : Professor Jeffrey Sachs in ‘Income Inequality Is a Structural Issue in US: Columbia’s Sachs’ on  Bloomberg Markets & Finance

We’ve had now, for decades, rising inequality and incomes stagnating or falling.

NEWS GRAB : Protestors Chanting in ‘Thousands rallied at Sydney Black Lives Matter protest authorised minutes before start’ on Guardian News

Black Lives Matter! Black Lives Matters! Black Lives Matter!

NEWS GRAB : Journalist Alice Keefe in ‘Black Lives Matter Maine protesters return to Portland Police Department for anti-racist rally’ on WMTW

For the second time this week, Black Lives Matter protesters gathered outside the Portland Police Department calling for change.

NEWS GRAB : Protestors Chanting in ‘No justice, no peace’: protesters mark Juneteenth across US’ on Guardian News

No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!

NEWS GRAB : Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in ‘World Health Organization declares coronavirus a pandemic’ on ABC News

COVID-19 can be characterised as a pandemic.

NEWS GRAB :

Antonio Guterres in ‘World in disarray: Angry exchanges at top UN meeting on COVID-19’

on Aljazeera English

It has killed nearly one million people around the world.

NEWS GRAB :

Sir David Attenborough in ‘ Sir David Attenborough calls for ‘urgent’ climate change action’ on ITV News

If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.

NEWS GRAB :

Greta Thunberg in ‘Greta Thunberg has told world leaders at the 2019 UN climate action summit in New York’ on The Guardian

The eyes of all future generations are upon you. If you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.

Martin Bliemel:

Environmental crises, income disparity, public health issues, organised crime, the list goes on. These wicked problems, as they’ve come to be known, what if I told you they could be solved? Perhaps the problem with the wicked problems was the way in which we approach them in the first place. Stick with me.

Martin Bliemel:

These problems are known as wicked problems. That means they’re often open, they have no boundaries, they’re hard to contain or define to a geography or sector. They’re complex. That means there are many elements that interact many relationships, and their interactions are not linear. And they’re networked. They’re across organisations and even across borders.

Martin Bliemel:

What if our greatest minds and excellent researchers have not been able to solve these problems, because, well, you just can’t tackle the problem with just one research discipline alone? These aren’t individual problems to begin with. Instead, they’re interrelated and intrinsically linked in a system of problems. And so, trying to solve any one part of the problem in isolation, no matter how well equipped and well-intentioned you are, is going to be near impossible.

Martin Bliemel:

The solution, I think, lies in something I’ve dedicated the next stage of my career to, something called transdisciplinary innovation. It’s a mouthful, I know.

Martin Bliemel:

I’m a Associate Professor, Martin Bliemel, and the Associate Dean of Research for the Faculty of, you guessed it, Transdisciplinary Innovation at UTS. In this episode of Impact at UTS, we’re going to break you out of your research silo and look at ways to collaborate across disciplines as well as external partners. We’ll examine the pleasures and pitfalls of co-designing research and we’re going to unpack one of the biggest buzz words out there right now, transdisciplinarity.

Martin Bliemel:

In doing so, we will debunk some myths about transdisciplinary collaboration, too. Helping me do this will be Professor Cameron Tonkinwise. He’s the Head of the Design Innovation Research Center at UTS.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

The first thing is just to recognise that you’re working in the spaces of difference. You’re not working in spaces of commonality.

Martin Bliemel:

And Professor Stuart White, the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS.

Stuart White:

I mean the problems are not chemistry problems or mathematics problems or engineering or sociology problems. They’re just problems. And so, we need a team of people with different disciplinary backgrounds.

Martin Bliemel:

But, first, what is transdisciplinarity, or TD as we like to call it? Like I said, the world is facing some pretty big problems, and no one field has the solution. Instead, we need to work together to find solutions to our problems. There are many definitions of transdisciplinary research and how to do it. We’ve boiled it down to three factors.

Martin Bliemel:

TD research involves mixing academic knowledges from across multiple disciplines, it involves mixing multiple applied knowledges through the collaboration with stakeholders outside the university, and it involves co-designing the research with those stakeholders using a human-centered approach.

Martin Bliemel:

One way to look at this is … I mean I suffer from allergies. If I have a runny nose, the simple solution is to grab tissues or menthols to address the runniness. But that just treats the symptoms not the cause. If you actually want to start unpacking that as a much more complex problem, you want to look at where is that coming from? Is it coming from colds? Is it from allergies?

Martin Bliemel:

Does it get into genetics? Does it get into how we feed ourselves, how we train our immune system right from day one, how we expose ourselves to dirt, whether we’re overcleaning, the whole hygiene theory thing, how society drives us to being so hygienic and clean? Where does our food come from internationally? It starts getting pretty messy pretty quickly when all I have is a runny nose.

Martin Bliemel:

So by taking a holistic approach, you’re not just treating the symptoms. You’re actually starting to keep asking why, why, why, why, why until you understand that this is actually a much bigger problem. It’s not just me having a runny nose. It’s perhaps a whole of society problem to which there might be a much more important and much more impactful solution that can help many, many people rather than just me.

Martin Bliemel:

TD has been around since universities began, before we carved up into faculties, schools, or degrees. It’s only recently that we started to organise knowledge using these boundaries that we’re all too familiar with. There’s a decades-old quip about universities being nothing more than individual faculties held together by a common grievance over parking.

Martin Bliemel:

As humans, we’d like to categorise, organise, and sort things. Who doesn’t like to assemble their own bookshelf and make sense of the clutter? We all like to put things into boxes. But what happens if those artificial boundaries or boxes are now getting in the way? Academics started redefining those boxes in the 1970s, when TD emerged as a distinct concept or way of thinking in the literature.

Martin Bliemel:

What TD means for individual practitioners and academics depends on where they are coming from. Someone who I don’t think would mind me calling them a practitioner of transdisciplinarity is Professor Stuart White, the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS.

Martin Bliemel:

Stuart has spent the last 20-some years working with academics across disciplines. He’s an expert in how you wrangle different minds and perspectives to create groundbreaking and impactful research. Here he is speaking with Impact Studios producer and journalist Cassandra Steeth.

Stuart White:

We have a mission to create change towards sustainable futures. We’re a research institute as part of the University of Technology Sydney. We’ve been going for over 22 years. Every day our research staff work on solutions to contemporary sustainability problems.

Stuart White:

The researchers at ISF come from a huge range of different disciplinary backgrounds, and that’s because the problems that we deal with on a day-to-day basis that our clients and funders present us with don’t have a disciplinary background themselves. I mean the problems are not chemistry problems or mathematics problems or engineering a sociology problems. They’re just problems.

Stuart White:

And so, we need a team of people with different disciplinary backgrounds, in fact with interdisciplinary backgrounds, to apply that thinking to the issues that we’re working on. In fact, many of our staff don’t think of themselves in terms of their disciplinary background, which is unusual in a university context.

Martin Bliemel:

The people that make up the Institute for Sustainable Futures are diverse. There isn’t a complete list, but they’ve got architects, lawyers, geographers, engineers, economists, scientists all working at ISF. They have varied backgrounds and ways of thinking, so getting all those minds in the room to work on a research project can be challenging at the best of times. Having a supportive culture and an openness to share knowledge and ideas is key. This is what Stuart sees as some of the benefits and barriers to TD collaboration.

Stuart White:

Well, the benefits of these collaborations is that you can make a difference in the world. I mean that’s what our mission is, to create channels towards sustainable futures, but it’s also what motivates our staff. So that’s really important that we make sure that our work is focused on engaging with clients to make a difference.

Stuart White:

In terms of it being transdisciplinary, it’s absolutely essential that we focus on the problem in a systems-wide, systems thinking, the idea that everything is connected to everything else, and you need to understand and, in some cases, actually be explicit and draw the boundaries of your system and recognize where it’s connected to other problems is an essential part of our analytical toolbox.

Cassandra Steeth:

Stuart, what would you say is best practice in co-designing research from a transdisciplinary approach with external partners?

Stuart White:

It should be viewed from a systems point of view. That’s the first and most important thing. The second is to do the research and design the research in a collaborative way to make sure that we are gaining knowledge from, firstly, the participants in the problem, which are often the clients and stakeholders, community, and so on. So to recognise that there are many different forms of knowledge. It doesn’t just come from journal articles, which is often the focus of academic research, but it actually comes from stakeholders engaged in the activities that we’re investigating.

Stuart White:

So that’s the first thing is to work very closely with clients and the stakeholders to do it in a collaborative way. Then to make sure that that research is used in some way, that it’s promoted, that it’s communicated, that it’s transparent, and that we’re getting the fruits of that research, the outcomes of that research out to the people who need to see it. So that’s a piece about the production of knowledge and the communication of knowledge.

Stuart White:

That’s extremely important to us because, A, it helps create change and, B, it’s a responsibility of researchers to make sure that the outcomes and the fruits of their research are shared widely and do create that change.

Cassandra Steeth:

With more than 20 years’ experience in sustainability research, have you come across differences in perception between academics and non-academics regarding what constitutes effective collaboration?

Stuart White:

Yes, that’s right. This is a significant issue. Part of the thread of our research over the years, in fact over 20 years, has been the application of the principles of deliberative democracy, so engagement of citizens to determine their preferences and to understand those preferences in a way that can help influence policy.

Stuart White:

So we battle with the notion that it’s the experts who should decide, and part of the problem is that often experts are skeptical of citizen preferences because they think they’re uninformed. Well, a lot of our research in deliberative democracy shows that there’s a way around this, which is to make sure that citizens can deliberate sufficiently to be informed, to make judgments informed by the knowledge that researchers and others can bring.

Stuart White:

And so, we’ve participated and designed many deliberative democratic processes very strongly supportive of these innovative approaches, which often use random selection. They use discussion, debate, deliberation, the ability to question experts, and the ability to spend sufficient time to deliberate and to come up with conclusions and findings either through citizens’ juries, citizens assemblies, or other processes similar to that.

Cassandra Steeth:

What have you found to be some of the benefits of having a breadth of perspectives on a research project?

Stuart White:

It’s hugely beneficial to apply a different perspective, and that can apply both to the different disciplines that you bring to the project, because if you are only studying a problem, say, for example, from an engineering point of view without considering the policy or the implications for the human perspective, the social perspective, then you generally miss the picture. If you think about a problem from an economics perspective without considering the political dimension, then you’ll often miss out on the solution, or worse, it will backfire.

Stuart White:

So to bring those disciplinary perspectives is absolutely crucial to solve the problem, but to then also bring other perspectives, both the systems thinking, a solution orientation, a lot of our work is much more about how do you find a solution to this problem rather than how do we get more accurate description of the problem itself, that’s really important. Don’t get me wrong. It’s really important that there are scientists, for example, who are trying to understand the impact of climate change, the nature of climate change, and the trajectories of climate change.

Stuart White:

That’s really important research, but it’s not what we do. We’re much more about saying we’ll take that information and now we’ll work out what we can do within the limits of our powers to try and solve that and change it.

Cassandra Steeth:

Can you speak of a specific time, Stuart, where having a diverse perspective really helped a research project or perhaps produced a different outcome?

Stuart White:

Yeah. Well, I guess one consideration would be some work that I was involved with starting 20 years ago, which was around the implementation of a deposit refund system for used containers. So the container deposit legislation is an incredibly contested area. Large beverage companies, packaging industry, and retailers strongly opposed, some local government and environment organisations and social welfare organisations strongly supporting. I was asked by the minister for environment in New South Wales to undertake a review of container deposit legislation in New South Wales.

Stuart White:

It was incredibly controversial, but we brought a variety of different perspectives to the problem because we recognized that a lot of the studies that have been done before had either been done from an economic perspective without taking into account the environmental implications of the policy, let alone taking into account the social implications of such policy, in terms of employment, in terms of the impact on low-income groups. People who are often collecting containers, are often low-income groups.

Stuart White:

So there’s a whole range of different factors that come into considering what’s an appropriate policy for increasing the collection rate for used containers. You would think it was a fairly simple problem, but the more that you look at it, the more you realize that not only is this contested, but it requires all of those perspectives in order to come up with decent public policy, particularly in light of the fact that there are multibillion-dollar industry sectors who are lined up on one side of the fence and other organizations lined up on the other side of the fence.

Stuart White:

So that was really useful for us to undertake that. Indeed, we used deliberative democracy as part of that to determine what randomly selected citizens also thought about this issue.

Cassandra Steeth:

What would your advice be for an early or a mid-career researcher who’s thinking about collaborating with another discipline?

Stuart White:

I think the future of research and the future of the higher education sector is such that that’s not just a recommendation. It’s not just a good thing to do. I think it will be increasingly an essential thing to do. I think the days of a traditional lockstep progression of an academic through a standard career were already starting to disappear and change. I think in the post-COVID era, I think that’s going to accelerate.

Cassandra Steeth:

The ISF has had a transdisciplinary approach to research for over 20 years now, as you’ve said. You’ve mentioned this fact that we’re seeing a cultural shift toward more transdisciplinary research. Why do you think we’re seeing the shift?

Stuart White:

Oh, there’s two factors at work. I think one is that as universities and researchers are trying to find funding outside their traditional funding sources, they will engage with contract research, engage with clients in government, in community, in the corporate world. Therefore, they’ll move towards the need to recognise transdisciplinary research, and then transdisciplinary research teams will need to be developed, because those problems present themselves in that way.

Stuart White:

So that’s the first thing. There’s a sort of, if you like, an economic imperative. But the second thing is I think there’s just general awareness and pressure that these issues need to be solved. We can’t stand by and continue to work in a model which is rarified and separated from those pressing issues of the world and not be influenced by them and not take part in them.

Stuart White:

I think there is a general trend. We see that in certainly younger people coming through who want to have a purpose. They’re much more purpose-driven rather than thinking, “I’ll have a standard academic career, PhD, postdoc, publications, lecturer, and so on.” There’s much more of a hunger for, “I want to be making a change in the world and that means I have to operate in a different way.”

Cassandra Steeth:

Increasingly, researchers are being asked to develop skills in complex collaboration. Researchers are not just researchers anymore. They’re also project managers. What do you think researchers need to be aware of when establishing external partnerships?

Stuart White:

The first thing that researchers need to think about in working with external partners is basically good old fashioned customer service, in the sense that understanding what it is that the client or the partner is concerned about and what drives them and what keeps them up at night is absolutely key.

Stuart White:

They’re the ones who need to be paid attention to in terms of their needs. Too often we see academics and university researchers coming to a problem and saying, “I’ve got a hammer. The problem looks very much like a nail.” That’s been a really limiting factor in the way that university research engages with industry partners, and by industry I mean the whole range, government, community organisations, and corporations.

Stuart White:

So that’s the first thing is to say what is it that the client wants to be talking with them about that often? This is something that, even after 20 years, we can improve at, is to be keeping in close communication, and often that’s challenging. Often, I mean clients can be quite demanding. Often there’s scope creep in terms of what we’re asked to do, and sometimes negotiations are required in order to come to a landing on some of those things.

Stuart White:

But it’s really important to keep communicating and to ensure that different voices are heard as well, recommending to clients that they engage, with other stakeholders, to say, “Okay. What do your stakeholders think of these? How do we ensure that we’re representing all of those different voices?” So that’s probably the most important message.

Cassandra Steeth:

What motivates you as an academic, as a Professor, and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures to continue working in this space?

Stuart White:

I mean the biggest motivation is the fact that I can see our work making a difference, both over the years but even in an accelerating way. I see impact is growing over time, it’s reaching a more receptive audience, and because it’s incredibly enjoyable to be doing that as well with a team of people.

Stuart White:

I mean the Institute staff are amazing in their commitment and they’re great to work with. Then that makes a huge difference. Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” I feel the same about working with good people brings its own reward, but also we’re making a significant difference. Just to keep doing that is worthwhile in itself.

Martin Bliemel:

Transdisciplinarity is transformative, uncomfortable at times, possibly even embarrassing as we humbly recognise we’re not the expert in the room. But it’s always rewarding and it’s always worth the effort to take the time to understand each other’s approaches and value systems, especially across academic disciplines or stakeholder groups. As my colleague Associate Professor Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer says, “We need to step towards each other and be courageous enough to leave the safety net of our own disciplines.”

Martin Bliemel:

Despite the challenges, working in a diverse group of curious and open-minded people facing complex problems is, well, a steep learning curve, but a perfect place for growth, learning, and knowledge creation. Now how can we move transdisciplinary innovation beyond being a buzz word?

Martin Bliemel:

One UTS professor doing just that is Cameron Tonkinwise. Cameron is the Head of the Design Innovation Research Center at UTS, where they explore the role design can play in moments of transition. Cameron’s work investigates the power of design to drive systems-level changes to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

Designers are people who pay attention to the material quality of everyday existence in ways that I think almost everybody else takes for granted. People only notice designed when it goes wrong. They tend to notice it when there’s a misfit or when there’s a lapse or when there’s something inconsistent. And so, to some extent, only designers know how important it is for experiences to feel like somebody has taken responsibility for all aspects of them from the overall arc right down to the detail of the pixel.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So I think design, at its best, just calls attention to the importance of us recognising the quality of things, attending to them, being a little more careful and slow, engaging with things in a richer kind of way.

Martin Bliemel:

Cameron is a designer, but he’s also a philosopher, so questioning the way things are is essential to the way he approaches research. So when an external partner comes to the Design Innovation Research Center, Cameron and his team employ what’s called frame creation. It’s a method set up by Kees Dorst, a Professor of Design in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation at UTS. He’s currently applying this method to help the United Nations implement their Sustainability Development Goals.

Martin Bliemel:

Frame creation is an innovation-centered approach that applies design thinking to problem solving. It focuses on the ability to co-design new approaches to the problem itself as opposed to racing to a solution. This is how Cameron explains frame creation. He’s speaking here with Cassandra Steeth.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So frame creation draws attention to that problem reframing part of the coevolution of problem and solution, which is the actual heart of designing. The expert designing is more about questioning the problem than it is about just creatively coming up with solutions.

Cassandra Steeth:

Fascinating. So the idea here is that you walk around in the problem for some time before you even contemplate the solutions and, as you say, question the problem and really interrogate that. When the Design and Innovation Research Center is involved with a client, how long do you spend working and thinking through the problem?

Cameron Tonkinwise:

That’s the absolute core of the way in which the Design Innovation Research Center works. We have very particular types of clients, a lot of them are government or government-related agencies or agencies that work with government departments and are working in context primarily of social justice, you could say, writ large.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

And so, they will come and bring us a problem they have. It’s a pressing problem. They need a solution. But they work with us precisely because they agree to sit down and spend some time questioning whether they’ve got the right version of the problem or not. So if a client comes to us and he’s really convinced that they have the right version of the problem, then, to some extent, we would just direct them to a design agency because that design agency can just start a solution on what the client thinks is the problem.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

If they come to us, they’re coming to a research center that’s part of a university because they want to research the problem. They want to research whether they’ve got the right version of the problem and they want to collaborate with us in order to understand that problem more deeply.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

They’re prepared to actually suffer with us some criticism that perhaps the first version of the problem they’ve got is the wrong one and maybe they were partly to blame for that. Maybe they’ve inherited a version of the problem that needs to be questioned.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So they come to us precisely because they want to engage in workshops, which are not about solutioning but are precisely about better understanding what they’re experiencing. So we definitely spend a lot of time, 95% of the time perhaps, in this problem framing area because we are a research center rather than a design agency.

Cassandra Steeth:

Interesting. When I was thinking about this interview, Cameron, I was so perplexed as to how you spend so much time in the problem and such little time in the solution, because I guess I was just reflecting on whether or not you get worried that you’re spending too much time on the problem and that perhaps some anxieties might creep in and you think, basically, “I better get going figuring out a solution here.”

Cassandra Steeth:

But it sounds as though the people that come to you, particularly the government agencies, it sounds as though the bulk of your clientele in some ways, they are coming to the Design Innovation Research Center because they actually want you guys to help question their problem. That’s effectively why they’re knocking on your door. Is that right?

Cameron Tonkinwise:

That’s absolutely the case. That kind of partners that we work with are people who have often tried existing ways of developing policy actions in response to the problem they’ve inherited or possibly even engaged big four consultancy in doing some design thinking workshops in order to hopefully hack quickly to a solution to their problem and have then discovered that none of those solutions, which looked promising initially, actually deal with the structural nature of the problem they’ve got.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So they find that their problem persists or morphs into another unintended consequence. They realise that they have not fully understood their own problem, even though it is their own field of expertise.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So the type of people who come to us do tend to have a vague sense of desperation or a vague sense of exasperation, often a kind a weariness that what has being available to them as innovation tools or implementation tools or solution and creativity tools haven’t adequately tackled what it is that they’re trying to do.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

We work with partners who really trust that, for the first 60%, 70% percent of the project, it’ll feel like nothing’s happening because a lot of people are just talking and arguing and drawing diagrams and making models. The only thing that’s emerging is difference. But it’s at the end of the acknowledgement of difference that people begin to see other ways of framing that just open up other ways of responding to their problems.

Martin Bliemel:

Spending 95% of your time researching and understanding the problem and just 5% of your time on the solution is going to feel pretty uncomfortable right but it’s important to realize that the unpredictability of TD requires giving it space and not overconstraining or controlling it, and space can mean a whole bunch of different things: space in the sense of allocating time, physical, space or digital platforms to air ideas.

Martin Bliemel:

That also means letting interactions build in a way that doesn’t force a prescribed path. These are sometimes called third spaces, and they can be designed to encourage new insights to emerge serendipitously. But you can’t depend on serendipity alone.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So collaborative facilitation or complex facilitation in that way is about taking people who have quite different worldviews on the same problem. So a lot of complex facilitation is about convincing people to come to a space.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

Often, if you think about a problem, you imagine that everybody just has the same version of it. But if you think about it a bit longer, you can imagine the way a social worker might think about criminality, the way in which a police person thinks about criminality, the way in which a household who just happens to live in an area with crime rates thinks about criminality. Though they’re thinking about the same thing, they definitely do not think about them in the same way.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

The last will clearly have their frame viewed by issues of fear and probably feel quite atomised and individualised in the way in which they approach that. A social worker will obviously try to think about it very much in terms of systemic issues of inequality and the kind of responses that society allows to begin to deal with that, but again on a case by case basis. The police will obviously think about crisis moments in which it’s necessary to get in the car and make an intervention.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

The last is to make sure that they walk away from the workshop understanding that they do actually have a very distinct perspective on the problem and that it is not shared even by people who happen to be in the same subject area.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So complex facilitation is not just about opening it up to participatory co-design. It’s a complicated process. It definitely isn’t just co-design with post-it notes, a nice colorful, playful atmosphere which everybody feels like they’re having fun and, therefore, drop their guard. It really does recognise that people have frames and that those frames are inherited and structural, even embodied, so that they’re held firmly in that it’s hard to get people to begin to loosen and shift.

Cassandra Steeth:

I’m curious, is there anything UTS academics starting out their impact and engagement journey, perhaps more early year researchers, can glean from complex facilitation?

Cameron Tonkinwise:

The first thing is just to recognize, as I said, that you’re working in spaces of difference. You’re not working in spaces of commonality. So I think there’s a wishful thinking in a democracy that we all have something in common and if we can just drop our guard, we could get into that space.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think telling or showing and demonstrating early career researchers that collaboration is difficult and never becomes easy, because those differences are structural and embodied, I think is really important. Often a young academic will have the hubris of the power of everything they’ve learned by becoming a specialist in their area, and will feel the power of the university as a convener, whereas I think because we do applied research in complex spaces, we’re able to demonstrate quickly that this is still going to be hard work.

Cassandra Steeth:

What do you see as the real advantage of co-designing research?

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think I’ll pull the word apart a little bit, and the first thing I would say is it’s just amazing how quickly this word has been evacuated of any meaning whatsoever. If we can risk being political, our Federal Government at the moment is fond of using the word in ways that I think are very evacuating of meaning.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So I’d just break the word down and say there’s the co-ing quality and there’s the design quality. How do you bring people into spaces in which they can collaborate, but it’s not some magical, new transdisciplinary space. It’s a space in which they acknowledge their distinct worldviews which are hard to break.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

It’s literally collaboration, it’s a labor. It’s a labor because people are speaking always from distinct positions and trying to find ways of understanding each other across that difference.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

The second is that I think the key quality to bring to research is that design side. So designers are obsessed with making a difference in the world. At the moment, the Federal Government’s telling everybody to impact and focus on end user engagement, et cetera. I mean that is what designers do. Designers are only ever interested in making a difference, in making something that makes a different future possible. That’s the purpose of design.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

Designers are always paying attention to this kind of material output, so much so that other disciplines rubbish them as being instrumental and productivist and too focused on outcome, but in fact I think it’s a really important missing element in much academic research. It’s still possible to be critical and speculative and asked basic questions within frameworks that nevertheless still want to make a difference, where that verb “make” literally means make things that make a difference.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So I think co-design makes a big difference to research when it’s collaboration and when it’s collaboration on making things that are going to make a difference.

Cassandra Steeth:

What do you think can go wrong with transdisciplinary research?

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think two things tend to go wrong with transdisciplinary research. The first is the assumption that it is possible for people who spent their lives getting their satisfiers and being very productive from disciplinary frameworks can quickly switch into so-called transdisciplinary engagements.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think it’s much more necessary to recognize that no academic says that they study biology. They are a biologist. No person studies engineering. They are an engineer. And so, when doing transdisciplinary work, you do transdisciplinary work as an engineer and you do transdisciplinary work as a biologist.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So I think there is too often a sense that transdisciplinarity is accessible and that people can quickly learn to drop their inheritance of how they’ve been trained in the worldviews and habits and practices associated with their discipline and just start engaging in some other kind of space.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think the first thing that goes wrong is just not recognising enough those differences. It does feel like sometimes designers are able to be sensitive to the kind of implicit bias where somebody who thinks they’re being very liberal in their transdisciplinarity is being liberal from their worldview of their discipline.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

I think that’s the first thing that tends to go wrong. I think the second thing is that there’s a sense that you can leave the transdisciplinary, if it could be accessed, as amorphous or dynamic or pluralist. I’m much more thinking that it is something that requires a whole new set of rigors and habits and practices.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

It’s changing these days, but a lot of transdisciplinary has not enough itself instituted its own way of doing things. It hasn’t created its own distinct practices.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

It’s not quite the case at UTS where the Transdisciplinary Innovation unit is trying to codify some of what is happening in that space. I think a lot of the work that Kees Dorst has been doing, taking a lot of design-only ways of working and then codifying them as things like frame creation or different ways of negotiating complexity, complex facilitation, these are world-leading because they’ve actually articulated transdisciplinarity as its own practice, as a set of rigors and procedures that help keep people from disciplinary backgrounds in this new emergent space.

Cameron Tonkinwise:

So I think the second danger is just when it becomes this open kind of VUCA, volatile, dynamic space. I think those are dangerous characterisations. I think the kind of challenges that transdisciplinarity tries to deal with are just so urgent and pressing that we don’t have time to just keep playing and experimenting in emergent ways in that space. We actually really need to constitute these as distinct ways of working.

Martin Bliemel:

Transdisciplinary innovation is not easy. Those who engage with it need to challenge assumptions, including their own biases. They need to be open-minded and learn to collaborate in a neutral space, where researchers can meet as equals in order to co-create the innovation.

Martin Bliemel:

It takes time. There won’t always be a quick win with TD. They need to get to know each other, get to know each other’s values, and it doesn’t always pan out. So this can be tricky, especially under today’s environment. There’s a temptation to be quite tactical and continue working only within your discipline, on problems where you’re the expert.

Martin Bliemel:

Instead, in TD, you’re not always the expert. Solutions can take more time to emerge and it can feel like you’re wasting a lot of shots. But you’re going to miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Society simply needs someone or a team to put your skates on, grab your stick, join a team, and score some goals against these wicked problems.

Martin Bliemel:

This brings me back to the importance of teams. Some of you may have heard of Pasteur’s quadrant. If you haven’t, head to our show notes page. If you imagine a two by two matrix of basic science versus applied science, the quadrant’s often referred to scientists like Niels Bohr for purely basic science, Thomas Edison for purely applied science, and Louis Pasteur for the hybrid of basic and applied science together. TD research fits nicely with Pasteur’s quadrant.

Martin Bliemel:

Now aside from noticing that the scientists are all men, this classification is illustrated and named after individuals, and that’s the point. Operating in Pasteur’s quadrant is often too much to ask for any one individual and better done as a diverse team. A supportive team can help you be comfortable with the uncomfortable and be confident times of uncertainty.

Martin Bliemel:

TD research can require what’s known as a negative capability, which sounds bad, but really that’s the capability about being open and embracing the confusion to learn something new. This level of comfort with uncertainty doesn’t come naturally to people who have built their entire careers on being an expert.

Martin Bliemel:

Aside from these personal challenges, there are some structural challenges at play here, too. At the federal level, a major challenge of TD is how research has allocated and funded according to field of research codes that favor monodisciplinary approaches. Meanwhile, there are many committees, working parties, and conversations happening across all levels at UTS to figure out how to put FOR codes into the background and to focus on research that needs to get done.

Martin Bliemel:

Many of us want to collaborate and for collaboration to be the new normal. There’s another structural problem at the faculty level. Within any given faculty, promotion is usually tied to publishing in a very narrow list of journals specific to a discipline. This creates tough conversations among cross-disciplinary collaborators about which journals to target for publication. Thankfully, there are multidisciplinary journals out there and there are ways out there to carve up the findings to target each discipline’s top journals.

Martin Bliemel:

Despite these issues, transdisciplinary collaboration is fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s essential to solve many of the problems we face. I hope this episode of Impact at UTS will help you think bigger and consider integrating multiple disciplines and practices on your next research project. If you want to find out more about TD and how to collaborate with us, head on over to tdi.uts.edu.au.

Martin Bliemel:

Next time on Impact at UTS, we’ll be looking at Indigenous-led knowledges and research. UTS has an incredible team of researchers and practitioners dedicated to improving the outcomes for First Nations people in Australia. Their work is as vital as it is impactful.

Martin Bliemel:

Distinguished Professor and Director of Jumbunna Larissa Behrendt, senior researcher Paddy Gibson, and barrister Craig Longman will share how self-determination is at the core of the research.

Larissa Behrendt:

We can tell by the research that the more aboriginal people are centrally involved in those things, in the creation of programs and the development of policy and the delivery of services, that there are actually better results, that there is a kind of evidence-based reason why you would support a philosophy of self-determination.

Martin Bliemel:

I’m Martin Bliemel, and you’ve been listening to Impact at UTS. Don’t forget, if you’re at UTS and you’re interested to learn more about research impact and engagement, head over to the UTS RES Hub website, reshub.uts.edu.au where you’ll find more information and helpful tools.

Emma Lancaster:

At Impact Studios, we work with the best scholars to embed audio in the research process, making one of a kind podcasts that entertain, inspire, and create change. To get in touch, you can email impactstudios@uts.edu.au. The production team live on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, whose lands were never ceded