By Bethany Laursen, Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Gabriele Bammer, Antonietta Di Giulio, Theres Paulsen, Melissa Robson-Williams and Sibylle Studer.
Are you thinking about creating a new toolkit for inter- and transdisciplinary research? What questions can help you consider whether to embark on such an effort? If you are a funder, how can you decide whether to support existing toolkits or fund new ones? And how can toolkits help your reviewers in considering funding applications?
We are the core members of the Toolkits and Methods Working Group hosted within the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance). Since 2020, we have jointly mapped and visualized the previously uncharted landscape of inter- or transdisciplinary toolkits. Without attempting to be exhaustive, we identified 64 English-language toolkits relevant to inter- and transdisciplinarity, as well as others in German, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese.
As curated collections of resources, toolkits provide methods, processes, concepts, heuristics, frameworks, and other assets for designing and implementing inter- and transdisciplinary research. However toolkits are now suffering from fragmentation, with multiple toolkits created by different communities without awareness of each other’s work.
In this i2Insights contribution we provide guiding questions to help the deliberations of those considering developing toolkits, as well as guiding questions for funders about supporting the development of toolkits and the use of toolkits in assessing grant proposals.
Guiding Questions for Toolkit Creators
If you are contemplating developing a new inter- and transdisciplinary toolkit, it is useful to consider the contributions your toolkit can make, issues related to quality, and various practicalities.
Questions about contributions to the inter- and transdisciplinary field include:
- What is the purpose and how does it help build the inter- and transdisciplinary field?
- What is the theoretical underpinning of your toolkit?
- Who is the target audience? How have you identified what users of your toolkit want and need?
- What does this toolkit provide that does not already exist? How does the toolkit link to and credit what already exists?
- Who created the knowledge you include, and how do they benefit from sharing this knowledge in your toolkit?
- How will you know that your toolkit has outlived its usefulness?
Questions about quality and quality control include:
- What does your toolkit require to be viable? What are the criteria for assessing the quality of the toolkit?
- How are decisions made about which tools to include?
- What makes a tool worthy of being included in your toolkit? Conversely, on what grounds do you reject possible tools?
- To what extent, and how, do you ensure that the tools meet your quality standards?
- How do you decide when a tool is out-of-date and needs refreshing or replacing?
- How do you ensure that your tool descriptions are comprehensible, and the overall toolkit is usable?
Questions about the practicalities of curating a toolkit include:
- How do potential users learn about your toolkit? How do you help users continue to access and use the toolkit?
- What are the day-to-day needs for maintaining your toolkit and can you secure them in an ongoing fashion?
- How is the toolkit funded? Is there a plan for securing ongoing funding?
- If your toolkit outlives its usefulness or is no longer maintained or funded, how will you prevent it from becoming ‘cyberspace junk’ that may inadvertently hide more up-to-date resources?
Addressing the field-building and quality questions allows toolkit creators to place their work in a broader context. The questions on practicalities are a reminder that toolkits are not only intellectual endeavors, but also digital-material objects, subject to the constraints of time and (cyber)space. These practical questions might seem banal but in fact integrate the intellectual questions around goals that drive toolkit creation.
Guiding Questions for Toolkit Funders
From a funder perspective, toolkits have two key roles: (1) toolkits as research infrastructure, and (2) toolkits as reviewer resources.
Well-designed, up-to-date toolkits indicate the state of the art in inter- and transdisciplinary research practice and can therefore be considered as infrastructure for the research community as a whole, as well as for reviewers evaluating inter- and transdisciplinary research proposals.
In supporting research infrastructure, funders could have a role that goes beyond the development of new toolkits. They could also consider a role they rarely play: providing long-term financial support, communicating toolkit availability, and encouraging systematic use of existing toolkits.
In assessing funding for the development of new toolkits, the earlier questions for toolkit creators are also pertinent for funders. Additional questions for funders include:
- How can we make applicants aware of existing toolkits?
- How can we support systematic dissemination of existing toolkits?
- How can we incentivize new and existing toolkits to ensure their resources are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, among other Open Science principles (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/)?
- Are there aspects of inter- and transdisciplinary research that are not yet adequately covered by existing toolkits?
- Which toolkits have shown promise and, with further support, could become keystones of inter- and transdisciplinary research infrastructure?
- How can we support the ongoing maintenance of these keystone toolkits?
In addition, funders could encourage their proposal reviewers to use toolkits for evaluating the quality of the tools that inter- and transdisciplinary projects propose to use.
Questions about toolkits as reviewer resources:
- Does the target project propose to use tools and methods from a well-designed, up-to-date inter- and transdisciplinary toolkit? How do the researchers plan to adapt the methods into their context?
- Which toolkits, that the researchers are not aware of, would be useful to the project?
- How can the project contribute to existing toolkits to further develop the inter- and transdisciplinary field?
What do you think?
What’s your experience been in developing, using and/or funding toolkits, be they in inter- and transdisciplinarity or other areas? Are there other considerations that you would add to the questions above?
To find out more:
Laursen, B., Vienni-Baptista, B., Bammer, G., Di Giulio, A., Paulsen, T., Robson-Williams, M. and Studer, S. (2024). Toolkitting: An unrecognized form of expertise for overcoming fragmentation in inter- and transdisciplinarity. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11: 857. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03279-9.
Much of the wording of this i2Insights contribution has been taken verbatim from this paper.
More information about the ITD Alliance’s Toolkits and Methods Working Group can be found at: https://itd-alliance.org/working-groups/toolkits_methods/
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence).
Bethany Laursen PhD studies, develops, uses, and evaluates tools that help people make sense of wicked problems. She is a Team Science Specialist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA and a member of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative. Bethany coordinates the Toolkits & Methods Working Group for the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance) and she maintains a consultancy called Laursen Evaluation & Design, LLC.
Bianca Vienni-Baptista PhD is Group Leader of ‘Cultural Studies of Science and Technology’ and Lecturer at the Transdisciplinarity Lab of the Department of Environmental Systems Science (USYS TdLab), ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the study of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge production processes. As a result, she is interested in methods and tools as well as concepts and theories as means of achieving transformative and developmental change. Together with her team, she investigates the specific conditions for transdisciplinary research and implements participatory co-production processes for sustainable development.
Gabriele Bammer PhD is Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at The Australian National University in Canberra. i2S provides theory and methods for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, especially for developing a more comprehensive understanding in order to generate fresh insights and ideas for action, supporting improved policy and practice responses by government, business and civil society, and effective interactions between disciplinary and stakeholder experts. She is the inaugural President of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (2023-25).
Antonietta Di Giulio PhD is leader of the Research Group Inter-/Transdisciplinarity and senior researcher at the Social Transitions Research Group (STR) in the Department of Social Sciences and at the Program Man-Society-Environment (MGU), Department of Environmental Sciences, both at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her areas of interest in inter-/transdisciplinarity are in theory of inter- and transdisciplinary research and teaching, methodology, knowledge integration and evaluation.
Theres Paulsen MSc is head of the Network for Transdisciplinary Research (td-net) of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and a member of the leadership board and Treasurer of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD-Alliance). She is located in Bern, Switzerland. She has expertise in knowledge exchange and transfer.
Melissa Robson-Williams PhD works at Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research in Lincoln, Aotearoa New Zealand as a senior researcher in environmental science and transdisciplinary research. She works in the Landscape, People and Governance team and manages the Integrated Land and Water Management research area. Her areas of interest are researching human environment relationships, managing the impacts of land use on water, science and policy interactions and the practice of integrative and transdisciplinary research.
Sibylle Studer PhD promotes co-production as head of the thematic knowledge & quality unit in an international cooperation organisation. The work described here was undertaken when she was head of Project Methods at the Network for Transdisciplinary Research (td-net) of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences in Bern, Switzerland. She was responsible for the td-net toolbox and was co-initiator of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Working Group on Toolkits and Methods. She is interested in collaborative modes of research and multi-stakeholder processes.
I am writing as someone who has been involved in developing a toolkit (https://www.shapeidtoolkit.eu/) which is no longer funded, despite being well-reviewed and popular. In the SHAPE-ID project we were aware of the importance of longer term funding for our toolkit but despite our best efforts were unable to obtain any. This experience has left me very aware of the role of funders in providing providing long-term financial support and encouraging the use of existing toolkits. Encouraging projects to produce toolkits without such support leads to a landscape of non-functioning online entities that is a waste of resources, and a disappointment to those who produce such resources and potential users..
Isabel, we couldn’t agree with you more. At one point I examined the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as an exemplar of a sustainable ‘toolkit,’ and their funding story is instructive. It took immense perseverance and creativity to fund it: https://plato.stanford.edu/about.html. I wish it wasn’t that hard for everyone.
Dear colleagues, thank you for your message.
I was inspired by the concise conclusion of this message with the question: “What do you think?”.
After reading this question, I first of all thought that it was counterproductive to correct this wonderful analytical note, which was written by a magnificent seven authors!
However, if there is no reason to adjust the practically useful content of the categories of issues described in this message, then an appropriate “theoretical framework” can be proposed into which this message can be inserted. With your permission, I’m going to philosophize a bit about the shape of this “theoretical framework”.
In scientific activity, a logical sequence of actions has been developed that contribute to the acquisition of new knowledge and solutions to problems of interdisciplinary interaction of this knowledge. The basic elements of this sequence include: method-context, methods-approaches, methods-techniques, operations, tools.
The “method-context” answers the question – “what is the essence of the object?”. When the object of research is a container in which flowers are inserted, then we need to accurately determine the context – is it a crystal vase, a ceramic jug, a plastic bottle or something else. Outside of a certain context, the researcher will have to consistently iterate over the methods-approaches until one of them coincides with the idealized or real image of this object.
The “method-approach” answers the question “what to study?”, i.e. assumes a certain theoretical justification of the object of research.
The “method-method” answers the question – “how to study?”. The answer to this question most often does not imply a theoretical justification of the object of study, but justifies the choice of optimal operations for its direct study.
Thus, the method-context, methods-approaches, methods-techniques, operations, tools form the necessary theoretical and methodological sequence: “what is the essence of the object?”, “what to study?”, “how to study?”, “what are the research operations?”, “what are the research tools?” This logical sequence is directly related to the content of the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary worldview. In such a logical sequence, the tools occupy an extreme position. Therefore, if we create toolsets outside of this logical sequence of methods, then most likely these tools will be short-lived and fragmented.
So you might want to add another category to the existing question categories in this post. This category of questions will relate to the essence of the used: method-context, methods-approaches, methods-techniques, operations. In this case, all categories of questions to the tools will acquire the necessary scientific (theoretical) rigor. Perhaps such scientific rigor will allow all research groups to get rid of the problems of fragmentation and short-term life of tool sets, make transdisciplinary research more effective, as well as more convincing and understandable for financial sponsors.