Education – Integration and Implementation Insights

The multidimensional process of co-creation: Five consistent dimensions

August 25, 2026August 25, 2026

By Katrina Messiha.

How can we avoid co-creation being used as a general term for any form of stakeholder engagement? Are there key dimensions that co-creation processes should aim to consider?

Based on analysis across 9 research fields, several types of co-creation and explicit theories, colleagues and I (Messiha et al., 2025) argue that co-creation is a multidimensional process, with five dimensions:

Multi-stakeholder collaborative action;
Process of co-learning towards innovation;
Contextual knowledge production;
Generating meaning; and
Open, trustful and inclusive dialogue.

These dimensions offer a conceptual tool for planning, examining and strengthening co-creation research.

Four lessons for pursuing participatory action-oriented PhD research inside the university system

June 23, 2026June 23, 2026

By Raymond Hyma and Javier García Martínez.

authors_raymond-hyma_javier-garcia-martinez — 1. Raymond Hyma (biography)
2. Javier García Martínez (biography)

What happens when participatory, relational, and action-oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty? What does it mean to pursue participatory and action oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?

We are PhD candidates in a university alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action-oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.

So, what are we learning so far?

Tinkering workshops: Exploring children’s perceptions of problems and potential solutions

June 2, 2026May 26, 2026

By Ina Opitz, Melanie Kryst, Pia von den Benken and Audrey Podann.

authors_opitz_kryst_benken_podann — 1. Ina Opitz (biography)
2. Melanie Kryst (biography)
3. Pia von den Benken (biography)
4. Audrey Podann (biography)

How can children’s everyday experiences and perceptions of problems and solutions be made accessible for potential inclusion in transdisciplinary research? How can these processes also be used to familiarise children with the fundamentals of transdisciplinarity?

We have developed a three-hour “tinkering workshop,” based on design science principles, to encourage children to think about their environment and identify problems and solutions in a playful and creative way.

Our tinkering workshop is suitable for children aged between 9 and 12 years. We have tried it out in four workshops with a total of 56 children, focusing on the problem of plastic waste.

Transdisciplinarity in education: Aligning conceptualisation, configuration and competencies

June 2, 2026May 12, 2026

By Hussein Zeidan.

How can we move from broad visions of transdisciplinarity to concrete educational practices that students can meaningfully engage with? What kinds of course designs genuinely support learning in complex, real‑world settings? And how do we ensure clarity, for both students and educators, about what these courses are meant to achieve?

These questions sit at the heart of many conversations among educators seeking to bring transdisciplinarity into their teaching practice. We want students to learn how to navigate complex problems, draw on multiple ways of knowing and develop the mindsets that allow them to work across boundaries with confidence. Yet the very flexibility that makes transdisciplinarity appealing can also make it difficult to design courses that are clear, supportive and aligned.

Boundaries as opportunities for learning

April 27, 2026April 14, 2026

By Roger Duck and Jane Searles.

author_roger-duck_jane-searles — 1. Roger Duck (biography)
2. Jane Searles (biography)

Think of a time when you noticed how different ‘they’ are from ‘us’. In that moment, did the relationship become more interesting and alive? Or did it flatten into what looked like a boundary – a barrier to be overcome or a connection to be engineered?

This i2Insights contribution is intended to stimulate your imagination by giving examples from practice of relationships between people and teams being treated as opportunities for learning, rather than boundaries.

Most readers of i2Insights work in research. We believe there is much of relevance here for any context in which people are working together, including research teams.

The context

We expand here on the idea that ‘a system boundary is simultaneously a process of drawing a distinction and identifying an active relationship of mutual learning’ (Duck and Searles 2021).

Navigating inter- and transdisciplinary PhD supervision: Practical questions for students and supervisors

May 12, 2026April 7, 2026

By Erika Angarita, Anna Hajdu, Yanyan Huang, BinBin Pearce, Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, Hussein Zeidan and Yuanyuan Zhu.

authors_angarita_hajdu_huang_pearce_peres-cajías_zeidan_zhu — 1. Erika Angarita; 2. Anna Hajdu; 3. Yanyan Huang; 4. BinBin Pearce; 5. Guadalupe Peres-Cajías; 6. Hussein Zeidan; 7. Yuanyuan Zhu (biographies)

How can a student and their supervisors develop a shared map for a PhD project when they come from different disciplinary traditions, hold different assumptions about knowledge and quality, and operate within institutional systems that are still largely structured around single disciplines? How can they navigate what may feel obvious to one and may be invisible to another?

We developed a structured checklist of questions designed to support supervision conversations and reduce tensions resulting from unspoken assumptions.The checklist aims to be a guide for thoughtful, ongoing reflection between supervisors and doctoral students. These questions cover five areas where misunderstandings commonly arise:

Epistemology: How each supervisor and student understands knowledge, methods, and validity.
Institutional support and expectations: The context shaping what is possible.
Complexity management: Working with uncertainty and external partners.
Career orientation and identity: Finding a place within (or beyond) academia.
Dissemination pathways: Deciding how and where inter- and transdisciplinary work has an impact.

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.

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.

A self-assessment checklist to improve interdisciplinarity in research projects / Un questionnaire d’auto-évaluation pour améliorer les projets de recherche interdisciplinaire

December 2, 2025November 4, 2025

By Flore Nonchez.

A French version of this post is available

How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?

The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.

A library guide to support transdisciplinarity

July 10, 2026October 14, 2025

By ANU Library Guide Working Group.

authors_anu-library-guide_working-group — Author biographies

What tools can libraries develop to support transdisciplinary education and research? What are the challenges and requirements to make such tool development happen?

Here we describe a library guide (commonly abbreviated to LibGuide), a tool often developed by individual libraries to showcase their resources on a particular subject and to provide a consistent pedagogical approach to such subject-specific resources.

The library guide that we developed focused on transdisciplinary problem solving and aims to provide introductory materials for students and academic staff across our university (The Australian National University). In particular, it supports the introduction of a university-wide educational program to ensure that all undergraduates develop skills allowing them to work with others to understand and creatively address amorphous and complex problems.

Five capacities for human–artificial intelligence collaboration in transdisciplinary research

June 10, 2025

By Faye Miller

faye-miller_2025 — Faye Miller (biography)

How can transdisciplinary researchers work with artificial intelligence as a genuine collaborator while maintaining integrative thinking? What new capabilities should be developed to ensure that artificial intelligence enhances, rather than fragments or compromises, cross-disciplinary human insights?

What can trandisciplinary researchers learn from human–artificial intelligence collaboration across disciplines?

Before moving on to capacities, let’s examine the growth in human–artificial intelligence research partnerships to see what lessons can be adapted by transdisciplinary researchers in their work. In particular, I suggest that integrative methodologies can be developed by understanding what is happening within the following domain-specific approaches.

Designing serious games to address transdisciplinary problems

November 5, 2024October 8, 2024

By Katharina Gugerell.

katharina-gugerell_2024 — Katharina Gugerell (biography) (photo credit: BOKU University)

What are serious games? What are their benefits? What is involved in developing serious games?

Serious games are digital, analogue or hybrid games designed in a way that goes beyond pure entertainment. They aim to educate or inform players or evoke discussions and conversations and provide an environment for futuring processes – in various fields, such as land-use, healthcare, water management, commons or natural hazards.

By integrating engaging gameplay elements with real-world scenarios or real-world contexts, serious games are expected to facilitate (different forms of) learning, interaction, world-building and scenario-building, as well as critical reflection on social, cultural, consumption and production practice. These games can incorporate real-time simulations, joint problem solving, and interactive storytelling to immerse participants into the topic. Serious games are celebrated for their motivational, emotional and entertaining aspects, that allow players to become familiar with different perspectives of complex problems or engage in futuring processes in a very intuitive and emotional way.