Awareness raising

Five capacities for human–artificial intelligence collaboration in transdisciplinary research

By Faye Miller

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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.

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A tool for transforming resistance to insights in decision-making

By Gemma Jiang

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Gemma Jiang (biography)

Do you encounter resistance from your team members, especially in regard to difficult decisions? How might decision-making processes be better facilitated to generate insights instead of resistance?

I describe a conceptual framework and an accompanying practical tool from Lewis Deep Democracy (2021) that can transform resistance to insights in decision-making processes.

The conceptual framework: Understanding how decision making generates resistance

It is important first to understand the consciousness of a team. If you think of a team’s consciousness as an iceberg, the ideas and opinions that are expressed are the conscious part above the waterline, while those that are not expressed are the unconscious part below the waterline.

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Why awareness raising campaigns cannot fix structural problems

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Pei Shan Loo (biography)

By Pei Shan Loo

Why are awareness raising campaigns popular? Why can’t they fix structural problems? And how can system dynamics help?

Large amounts of funding for health, societal, environmental and other complex problems are channelled into “awareness raising” to build public recognition of the problem in the hope that understanding will lead to change and a lasting solution.

Why awareness raising campaigns are popular

There are at least four reasons why funding is spent on awareness raising campaigns:

  • Such campaigns can readily be conducted in short timeframes. For example, if funding is available for a one-year project, this is enough to successfully complete an awareness raising campaign.
  • Similarly, awareness raising campaigns can usually be tailored to fit limited budgets.
  • Training for local project staff to undertake such campaigns is relatively straight-forward.
  • Pre-post campaign evaluations are straight-forward and usually demonstrate increased awareness and interest in the topic of the campaign.

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Using a cartoon video to achieve research impact

By Darren Gray, Yuesheng Li and Don McManus

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1. Darren Gray (biography)
2. Yuesheng Li (biography)
3. Don McManus (biography)

In the right circumstances, a cartoon video can be an effective way to communicate research information. But what’s involved in developing a cartoon video?

This blog post is based on our experience as a Chinese-Australian partnership in developing an educational cartoon video (The Magic Glasses, link at end of post) which aimed to prevent soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worm) infections in Chinese schoolchildren. We believe that the principles we applied are more broadly applicable and share them here.

Developing the cartoon video involved three major steps: formative research, production, and pilot testing plus revision.

Formative research

The aim of the formative research is to better understand what you want to change, which in our case was a reduction in behaviours which put Chinese children at risk of being infected by soil-transmitted helminths.

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