Partner – GAIA journal

Three lessons for designing serious games for educational settings

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.

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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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Actor constellation role plays

By Alexandra Frangenheim.

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Alexandra Frangenheim (biography)

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.

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Lessons for transformative research from co-creating a conference without a fixed plan

By Thomas Bruhn.

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Thomas Bruhn (biography)

In developing a conference, what does it take for people to leave their comfort zones to co-design something new? What possibilities does this open up for more meaningful conference designs? What are the broader lessons for transformative research?

In 2023–2024, I worked with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to develop a conference format for the German sustainability research community – something to help re-establish connection after the isolating COVID pandemic years, and to strengthen interdisciplinary exchange. The Ministry wanted something new and innovative.

Early in the conversation, I sensed hesitation when unconventional, interactive conference formats were suggested.

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Designing serious games to address transdisciplinary problems

By Katharina Gugerell.

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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.

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Photovoice as a participatory research method

By Jule Marie Huber, Claudia Bieling, María García-Martín, Tobias Plieninger and Mario Torralba

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1. Jule Marie Huber; 2. Claudia Bieling; 3. María García-Martín; 4. Tobias Plieninger; 5. Mario Torralba (biographies)

How can research effectively engage vulnerable and marginalised groups on issues that affect their lives? How can local knowledge, opinions, and experiences be captured in a way that identifies their concerns and priorities?

Photovoice is a research method that uses photographs taken by participants to encourage dialogue within the community. It was developed to empower marginalised groups and promote community action, and is also more widely useful as a participatory method. It has been used for issues in public health, immigration, homelessness, disability, youth and sustainability.

In this i2Insights contribution we describe a 7-step procedure for using photovoice, noting that considerable flexibility is possible.

Step 1: Development of a research design

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Participatory video

By Pamela Richardson

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Pamela Richardson (biography)

What is participatory video? How can it enhance participatory research? What’s required to make participatory video work well?

Participatory video involves the co-production of videos in a group setting and can be used for community development, research and advocacy. The focus here is on research and, as a tool for communication and reflection, participatory video can support many different steps along a research journey, including:

  • co-creation of video-based funding proposals or the development of group plans,
  • project documentation and reflection,
  • participatory monitoring and evaluation,
  • dissemination of “best practices” or communication of results and lessons learned.

In these ways, video-making by participants can support both internal and external communication processes within a research project.

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Public participation geographical information systems

By Nora Fagerholm, María García-Martín, Mario Torralba, Claudia Bieling and Tobias Plieninger

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1. Nora Fagerholm; 2. María García-Martín; 3. Mario Torralba; 4. Claudia Bieling; 5. Tobias Plieninger (biographies)

What is encompassed by public participation geographical information systems? What resources are required? What are the strengths and weaknesses of involving stakeholders?

Participatory mapping combines cartography with participatory approaches to put the knowledge, experiences, and aspirations of people on a map. Under this umbrella term, public participation geographical information systems refers to the use of geographical information systems (GIS) and modern communication technologies to engage the general public and stakeholders in participatory planning and decision-making.

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Participatory scenario planning

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1. Maike Hamann (biography)
2. Tanja Hichert (biography)
3. Nadia Sitas (biography)

By Maike Hamann, Tanja Hichert and Nadia Sitas

Within the many different ways of developing scenarios, what are useful general procedures for participatory processes? What resources are required? What are the strengths and weaknesses of involving stakeholders?

Scenarios are vignettes or narratives of possible futures, and when used in a set, usually depict purposefully divergent visions of what the future may hold. The point of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to explore its uncertainties. Scenario development has a long history in corporate and military strategic planning, and is also commonly used in global environmental assessments to link current decision-making to future impacts. Participatory scenario planning extends scenario development into the realm of stakeholder-engaged research.

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Integrating context, formats and effects in transdisciplinary research

By tdAcademy 2021 GAIA paper authors

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Author biographies

What are the key aspects of transdisciplinary research and how can they be integrated effectively?

Four key aspects of transdisciplinary research are:

  • context dependencies
  • innovative formats
  • societal effects
  • scientific effects.

These are illustrated in the figure below, along with a summary of an ‘ideal’ transdisciplinary research process.

1. Context dependencies

Context dependencies are the factors that influence both the research design and the interpretation of results and include: who is involved (the actors), the social, cultural, political and other conditions, and the research setting (for example is it outside the lead researchers’ home country).

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Choosing a suitable transdisciplinary research framework

By Gabriele Bammer

Author - Gabriele Bammer
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

What are some of the key frameworks that can be used for transdisciplinary research? What are their particular strengths? How can you choose one that’s most suitable for your transdisciplinary project?

The nine frameworks described here were highlighted in a series for which I was the commissioning editor. The series was published in the scientific journal GAIA: Ecological Perspectives in Science and Society between mid-2017 and end-2019.

Choosing among them is not a matter of right or wrong, but of each being more or less helpful for a particular problem in a particular context. And, of course, different frameworks can also be used in combination.

The brief descriptions and figures that follow aim to encapsulate each framework’s key strengths.

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Structure matters: Real-world laboratories as a new type of large-scale research infrastructure

By Franziska Stelzer, Uwe Schneidewind, Karoline Augenstein and Matthias Wanner

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1. Franziska Stelzer (biography)
2. Uwe Schneidewind (biography)
3. Karoline Augenstein (biography)
4. Matthias Wanne (biography)

What are real-world laboratories? How can we best grasp their transformative potential and their relationship to transdisciplinary projects and processes? Real-world laboratories are about more than knowledge integration and temporary interventions. They establish spaces for transformation and reflexive learning and are therefore best thought of as large-scale research infrastructure. How can we best get a handle on the structural dimensions of real-word laboratories?

What are real-world laboratories?

Real-world laboratories are a targeted set-up of a research “infrastructure“ or a “space“ in which scientific actors and actors from civil society cooperate in the joint production of knowledge in order to support a more sustainable development of society.

Although such a laboratory establishes a structure, most discussions about real-world laboratories focus on processes of co-design, co-production and co-evaluation of knowledge, as shown in the figure below.

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