A framework for navigating the impact of using artificial intelligence on collaborative research communication

By Faye Miller.

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Faye Miller (biography)

How can research teams recognise when their use of artificial intelligence is affecting their ability to integrate different knowledge and perspectives? How can they navigate the impact of artificial intelligence on their collaborative processes?

When research teams use artificial intelligence in collaborative work, new complexities emerge, especially subtle shifts in communication patterns that can fundamentally alter how teams integrate different perspectives and knowledge forms. Consider an environmental team relying on artificial intelligence summaries across hydrology, ecology, and policy. They might miss crucial disciplinary nuances, or follow its “evidence-based” recommendations that may clash with community priorities.

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Three lessons for designing serious games for educational settings

By Alice H. Aubert.

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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.

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Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

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Ulli Vilsmaier (biography)

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.

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Training specialists to solve wicked problems

By Vladimir Mokiy.

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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.

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Participatory content analysis

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

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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.

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Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

By Jamais Cascio.

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Jamais Cascio (biography)

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.

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Six key steps for stakeholder engagement

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

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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.

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Stories of self, us, and now: A tool for navigating uncertainty

By Gemma Jiang, Alexis Niki, Darius Melvin and Sarah Hind.

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Alexis Niki (biography)
3. Darius Melvin (biography)
4. Sarah Hind (biography)

In times of uncertainty, especially when the role of research, as well as research funding are under threat, how can research teams effectively respond? How can storytelling help?

We show how Marshall Ganz’s (2009) Stories of Self, Us, and Now framework can move groups from individual experiences of uncertainty (Self) to shared meaning (Us), and toward concrete action steps (Now).

Workshop Context

Leadership team members from a large transdisciplinary, cross-institutional research center, entering the fifth (final) year of their funding cycle, partnered with an external team science expert

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

By Flore Nonchez.

A French version of this post is available

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Flore Nonchez (biography)

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.

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Four tips for developing norms for collaboration agreements

By Edgar Cardenas.

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Edgar Cardenas (biography)

Norms are the foundational building blocks for collaboration agreements. Hence, we must consider what’s an effective way for teams to develop the norms underpinning a collaboration agreement? How can teams build on experience and avoid getting bogged down when negotiating norms?

In helping teams to develop norms that enable productive collaborations, I use Richard Hackman’s definition of norms as “shared agreements among members about what behaviors are valued in the group, and what behaviors are not. They refer only to behavior, including things members say, not to unexpressed private thoughts and feelings” (Hackman, 2011, p.103).

In other words, norms that help you collaborate better must be grounded by clearly identifiable behaviors and team members must agree to abide by these norms. When developing a norm, the team then has to ask: “Is the behavior clear enough that team members have a shared understanding of the specific behavior?” and “Do we agree to using this norm?”

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Four conditions for co-designing for First Nations leadership

By Jessica Wegener, Barry Williams, Jacqueline Gothe and Sarah Jane Jones.

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1. Jessica Wegener (biography)
2. Barry Williams (biography)
3. Jacqueline Gothe (biography)
4. Sarah Jane Jones (biography)

How can research effectively strengthen Indigenous leadership and incorporate respectful design to support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination? 

We retrospectively reflected on our experience of working together in a project focused on land and fire management in a specific region in Australia, a project that involved Indigenous Cultural Fire Practitioners, Elders, and community members, as well as Local Aboriginal Land Councils, local councils and government agencies (Gothe et al., 2025). This reflexive analysis aimed to understand and share what we have learned as participants in this Indigenous project as a contribution to the complex work of ensuring meaningful ways to support Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and the use of co-design in Indigenous-led land-based projects situated in urban contexts.

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A library guide to support transdisciplinarity

By ANU Library Guide Working Group.

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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.

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