Community Member

Three lessons for designing serious games for educational settings

March 3, 2026February 24, 2026

By Alice H. Aubert.

alice-aubert — Alice H. Aubert (biography)

What is Triadic Game Design and what lessons does it provide for designing and analysing serious games in an educational setting?

Triadic Game Design

The Triadic Game Design is a design framework for serious games that defines three essential, interrelated elements—Reality, Meaning, and Play—that need to be integrated and balanced (Harteveld 2011).

Reality ensures the game represents the real world sufficiently (ie., in a valid and reliable way that can be understood by the target players). Subject-matter experts model the Reality in the game focusing on the problem, its influencing factors, and relationships.

Meaning pertains to the game’s purpose and its transference to the real world, to create added value through playing the game.

Moving from epistemic paternalism to transformative transdisciplinarity

February 17, 2026

By David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani.

authors_david-ludwig_charbel-el-hani — 1. David Ludwig (biography)
2. Charbel N. El-Hani (biography)

How can we overcome the epistemic paternalism that has long shaped relations between science and society? How can a transformative vision of transdisciplinarity emerge from the interplay between epistemic diversity and epistemic decolonization?

Demands for transdisciplinary research reflect an intricate politics of knowledge that can be described through a triad of paternalism, diversity, and decolonization. Epistemic paternalism has become widely criticized in many debates about development and modernization. For example, international development projects are often deeply paternalistic by assuming that science and technology of the “developed world” should be simply exported into the “underdeveloped world,” where they are imagined as generating economic growth and societal progress.

Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

February 24, 2026February 12, 2026

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?

Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.

A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.

Training specialists to solve wicked problems

February 10, 2026

By Vladimir Mokiy.

vladimir-mokiy_2026 — Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

How can a modern university train highly qualified specialists who are able to rethink and unambiguously solve wicked problems?

Here I build on my previous i2Insights contribution Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline, the methodology of which aims to unify and generalize complementary and non-complementary disciplinary knowledge and methodologies. This metadiscipline provides the basis of a proposed curriculum for a two-year training program at the masters level. The intention is that specialists would be trained in systems transdisciplinarity using a single curriculum to ensure a uniform level of professional capabilities and competencies.

The curriculum

The curriculum involves the organization of training in four sections.

Participatory content analysis

February 10, 2026February 3, 2026

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

andreanne-chu-breton-carbonneau — Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?

Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.

Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

February 10, 2026January 27, 2026

By Jamais Cascio.

Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?

I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.

Actor constellation role plays

January 20, 2026

By Alexandra Frangenheim.

How can transdisciplinary researchers gain a better understanding of systemic and multi-causal problems, including recognising different thought styles, appreciating the complexity of intervening, and anticipating points of conflict?

Actor constellation is a role play for identifying the relevance of various actors involved in specific problems. It is useful for problem framing when a research team is formed, for example to plan empirical inquiries or to identify relevant actors for addressing research questions. It also enables researchers from different disciplines and practitioners to uncover hidden dynamics and possible systemic solutions to the problem of interest, and to unlock the potential of shifting perspectives to ultimately develop new narratives.

When research participants represent relevant actors in a role play, their implicit assumptions about relationships, structures, interaction and actors’ knowledge are made explicit.

The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance

January 20, 2026January 13, 2026

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

frederic-darbellay_2023 — Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?

Tenth annual review

January 13, 2026December 16, 2025

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

By Gabriele Bammer.

This is the tenth annual “state of the blog” review.

What are the major achievements of i2Insights for 2025? What have been the main themes of the contributions made? How do these reflect the aims of i2Insights?

This is the last post for 2025. We’ll be back on January 13, 2026 and already have a number of great contributions to start the new year.

Achievements

We celebrated three major achievements in 2025.

1. Our 10th anniversary

In November i2Insights marked its 10th birthday as a global, comprehensive, living toolkit.

We are particularly delighted that INTEREACH (Interdisciplinary Integration Research Careers Hub) is devoting its 2025-2026 webinar series to spotlighting themes from i2Insights.

Six key steps for stakeholder engagement

January 13, 2026December 9, 2025

By Khara Grieger, Kimberly Bourne, Alison Deviney and Nourou Barry.

authors_grieger_bourne_deviney_barry — 1. Khara Grieger (biography)
2. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
3. Alison Deviney (biography)
4. Nourou Barry (biography)

How can you systematically plan stakeholder engagement? What are the key issues that need to be considered? What guiding questions can help?

STEP 1: Identify and clarify engagement goals

Spend time at the beginning of the engagement process to clearly identify why you are engaging with stakeholders. Common goals include sharing knowledge or information; collecting insights, perspectives, or information from stakeholders; and co-creating or co-designing solutions. Other potential goals may include building trust and improving transparency, enhancing collaborations and partnerships, and improving the implementation of decisions.

Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map

December 2, 2025December 2, 2025

By Katie Moon.

In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?

In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.

i2Insights@10years: Strengthening a global, comprehensive, living toolkit for tackling complex problems

January 13, 2026November 25, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

How can i2Insights best capitalise on its first ten years and the wealth of resources contributed from around the world? How can you contribute to strengthening the i2Insights toolkit?

On 25 November 2025, i2Insights celebrates its 10^th birthday as a toolkit to support researchers and educators tackling complex societal and environmental problems, specifically providing tools to understand and address complexity. It sets out to be:

global, with contributions from around the world
comprehensive, tackling all aspects of addressing complex problems
living, continuing to grow and stay up-to-date.

It’s a good time to reinvigorate the aims, strengthen the toolkit and celebrate achievements.