Short abstract:

Reflecting on our roles as boundary workers in the EU-funded Better Factory project, we guided 16 diverse empirical cases, transitioning SMEs into cyber-physical systems. Emphasizing the art-driven collaborative methodology, our focus has been on showcasing its efficacy in addressing SME challenges.

Long abstract:

This paper reflects on our roles as boundary workers in the EU-funded Better Factory (BF) project, spanning four years and two rounds.

Better Factory assembled 16 diverse empirical cases comprising SMEs, artists, and technology providers, with a central goal of transitioning manufacturing SMEs into cyber-physical systems and establishing lean-agile production facilities. Our involvement included mentoring the artists of 16 of these Knowledge Transfer Experiments (KTE), and our primary focus was to foster collaboration and facilitate meaningful contributions. This involved actively promoting collaborative synergies and empowering artists to contribute significantly to redesign and co-create innovative solutions and visions.

The BF methodology, an Art-driven Innovative Collaborative Method, leverages the Collaboration Toolkit from S+T+ARTS. Employing Challenge-driven and Mission-Driven approaches, the former involves artists collaborating with SMEs or technology providers to address industrial and societal challenges and prototyping solutions for defined SME problems. The latter encourages artists to explore new paths in response to future speculative designs aiming at social as well as technological impact, driven by notions of care, ethical and responsible innovation. This dual BF methodology offers a versatile framework for addressing specific SME challenges or exploring innovative solutions using arts-based research and critical making.

In our role as 'art mentors,' we guide artists through ideation, experimentation, and prototyping cycles. Our 32-month mentoring period involved research by practice where we used reflexive and active observant approaches to improve the Artist-Industry Collaboration toolkit and deliberately design collaborations for mutual benefit across art and industry.

Short abstract:

TDR lacks a common definition and methodology which hinders knowledge co-creation that leads to societal impact. We fill this gap by compiling interrelated bodies of literature into a list of 12 boundary work activities that may enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge for societal impact.

Long abstract:

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is one method where scientific and societal actors, each with various backgrounds, collaborate to address complex problems through knowledge co-creation. Despite its widespread use, TDR still lacks a common definition and methodology which makes it challenging to define clear mechanisms for knowledge co-creation that facilitate impact. Many authors across complementary bodies of literature provide lists of principles, best practices and approaches for TDR, but in practice these are rarely applied consistently. In this conceptual paper, we fill this gap and increase methodological coherence for TDR by consolidating these bodies of literature into a list of suggested activities for scientists and practitioners across contexts to apply to enhance the impact of their work. We consolidate primary and secondary literature from the fields of TDR, research impact, stakeholder engagement, project management, boundary work and knowledge systems with our own practical experience in sustainability TDR projects. This synthesis leads to our conceptual and analytical framework of twelve boundary work activities that enhance credible, salient and legitimate (CSL) knowledge. Our assumption is that if boundary work activities are successfully implemented across the phases of a TDR project and enhance CSL knowledge, then there will be cascading effects that support a higher likelihood of knowledge use and outcomes that lead to impact. We understand TDR impact as the desired long-term changes that are agreed upon by the involved TDR actors based on the sustainability problem and scientific knowledge gaps they aim to address.

Short abstract:

Limited knowledge exists on how distant disciplinary collaborations form and function between artists, scientists, and technologists. This paper, based on a Q-Study of 42 art-science practitioners, explores the social ecology of collaboration as an ITD creative and cultural practice.

Long abstract:

Distant disciplinary interactions between artists, scientists, and technologists have been a topic of interest, however, systematic knowledge on how diverse collaborative structures form and function is limited. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the social ecology of collaboration between artists, scientists, and technologists engaged in inter/transdisciplinary creative and cultural practice. The study explores the collaborative experiences of 42 participants with the use of Q-methodology, offering a framework for diverse styles of de-disciplined creative collaborations manifesting a complex set of agencies shifting between diverse epistemic cultures. From the data, five thematic narratives emerge which are not mutually exclusive. Three narratives provide a coherent assemblage of collaborative styles characterised by knowledge creation through embodiment and experimentation. These styles invite collaborative cultures, processes and methods conducive for co-creating inter/transdisciplinary knowledge characterized by uncertainty and serendipity. A fourth narrative portrays the collaborative dynamics in creating artworks that critically engage with science and technology. The fifth theme, a bi-polar factor presents the conflicting perceptions on mediated third space in art-science-technology collaborations. This research reveals the influence of art on ITD research and science domains through creative collaborations. The findings contribute to development of radical structural approaches for recombinant disciplinary knowledge cultures.

Short abstract:

Lessons learned from studying ITD could be useful for understanding potential collaborations between STS and ITD. Based on dynamics I observe in my dissertation, I discuss some of the possible preconditions for exchanges between STS and ITD, centering on the notion of epistemic peerage.

Long abstract:

There is a sense in which collaborations between STS and ITD scholars could themselves be considered discipline crossing (or at least field crossing). Although both communities are diverse, there are some central theoretical points of departure in each community that differ from the other. Thus, it seems reasonable to apply some of the lessons we have learned from studying ITD on the case of interactions between STS and ITD scholars.

I therefore draw on two case studies from my doctoral dissertation to discuss some of the dynamics that are to be expected from such collaborations. A key lesson from my cases is that discipline-crossing collaborations coordinate demarcating boundary work and collaborative boundary crossing. Actors deemed too distant or too opposed to the goals of research are kept out of the collaboration, yet there also needs to be theoretically interesting boundaries between participants if new integrative knowledge is to be produced. There is a balance to be struck, making sure that collaborators are different, but not too different.

I argue that the central question regarding this balance is whether collaborators can recognize each other as epistemic peers. Epistemic peerage is a mutual recognition of equal epistemic competence. This allows discipline-crossing collaborators to recognize contributions to a project even if there isn’t a complete consensus regarding the meaning of each contribution. In this presentation, I explore some of the dynamics underlying epistemic peerage in ITD and how it can apply to interactions between STS and ITD.

Short abstract:

Inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) knowledge production faces paradoxes inherent to collaboration in large research centres. Identifying two paradoxes in a large Swiss research centre of competence, we argue that strategic management of ITD-paradoxes could strengthen existing collaborative models.

Long abstract:

Inter- and transdisciplinary (ITD) knowledge production faces a set of paradoxes inherent to the co-production of knowledge in large research centres. Taking a large Swiss centre of competence as a case study, we identified two paradoxes inherent to research and its transfer at the interface of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC). The research centre composes of a highly interdisciplinary pool of researchers and is funded with an explicit aim of enhancing ITD-research. Through an STS-inspired ethnography communicated in 6 interrelated narratives, we argue that ITD work is challenged by two paradoxes – defined as “contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time (Smith and Lewis, 2011: 382).” Building on recent advances in the paradox theory and STS, we further argue that these paradoxes are in fact intrinsic to ITD work in discourse and practice. While transfer to industry is challenged by the different aims of truth-making and profit-making, reflected particularly in varying career incentives, team science is challenged by the cooperation-competition paradox.

Employing the paradoxes as analytical tools to discuss the ethnographic accounts, we shape the argument through cycles of theorizing. Doing this, we adopt notions from management literature on paradoxes and combine them with a heuristic ITD tool to overcome challenges in future ITD research work and management later to be tested in practice with members of the unit of study. We conclude by arguing that strategic management of inherent ITD-paradoxes could strengthen collaborative models and methodologies in ITD-teams in large research centres.

Short abstract:

This paper outlines creative producing as an emergent inter/transdisciplinary approach to transformative knowledge creation. This is done through contextualising a global collective description of creative producing using feminist STS theories that attend to the contexts of knowledge production.

Long abstract:

Creative producers have an emergent role in creative industries and interdisciplinary research – but have had limited attention beyond a handful of sectors. The Ars Electronica Creative Producer Program (2021) saw collective critical reflection during a 6-week program with 22 diverse global practitioners. Undertaking research by practice, the findings were formed through thematic analysis, deliberation, and collective reflection - ultimately leading to a delineation of the role of creative producer as a boundary worker from the process of creative producing as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) practice.

The Manifesto that resulted from the program provides a tool for interrogating creative producing's role in transformative knowledge production. It shows that this ITD practice is underpinned by the concept of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1997). I use this, and non-essentialist feminist theories in STS, to contextualise and interrogate creative producing as an ITD practice which takes 1) a relational orientation to knowledge production, that is underpinned by 2) a reflexive orientation, and is 3) driven by a care-full orientation.

Looking at this in field of art-science, this nuanced understanding of creative producing reveals how this ITD practice creates transformative knowledge by attending to the way that “meaning is continually produced, contested and negotiated through social practices and power relations” (Hunter 1996) with specific methods “realised through experience” by boundary workers (Pinxit-Gregg, 2021). Through examples I show how this approach has the potential to unpick the 'problematic' of epistemic hierarchies and cultures between art and science (Salter 2021) to mediate societal transformation.

Short abstract:

We discuss our care-full, experiential methodologies for doing transdisciplinary sociodigital futures. Inspired by the experiential turn in futures studies and theories of care, we centre attention on experience, materiality and affect to navigate the ambivalences of interdisciplinarity.

Long abstract:

We are STS researchers working in sociodigital futures in a transdisciplinary context, with the combined challenge of working across disciplines and sectors in a field still in the making. We approach these challenges by centring attention and collaborative processes on experience, materiality and affect. We are inspired by the “experiential turn” (Candy, 2017) in futures studies, and theories of critical care as a “selective mode of attention” (Martin et al., 2015) but also as a doing (Puig della Bellacasa, 2016). We think of this combination as instrumental for materialising plurality (Kimbell 2019) and for working with heterogeneity (Vienni-Baptista et al 2022).

Our position is thus not purely analytical but relational, practice-led, and situated at disciplinary borders as we study futures in the making (Candy and Dunagan, 2017). In the context of sociodigital futures, locating our work within an experiential and embodied space is also a way to care critically (Martin et al. 2015) for our disciplinary differences. In this paper, we discuss our care-full, experiential methodologies for doing transdisciplinary sociodigital futures with three examples.

·Thinking/Making/Doing accompany interdisciplinary explorations through design- and arts-based futuring methods.

·Futures speculations transforms the academic exercise of ‘reading’ into cross-sector, practice-led conversations.

·Early-career researcher (ECR) collective convenes a network for building relations of mutual care and reflecting on interdisciplinary identities, disrupting the ‘business as usual’ of ECR trajectories.

By creating a field of possibilities anchored in experience, we hold space for “slowing down care” (Martin et al., 2015) and navigating the ambivalences of interdisciplinarity.

Short abstract:

In this presentation, we apply Star and Greisemer’s Articulation Work framework to understand collaborative work in four cases in Latin America. Here, we pay explicit attention to peripheral communities involved in TD work, communities that have long been marginalized yet get the work done.

Long abstract:

A central objective of any transdisciplinary (TD) sustainability project is to achieve deep levels of cross-sector integration and knowledge sharing. The science and technology studies (STS) framework proposed by Susan Leigh Star (Star & Greisemer, 1989) has been extensively applied as a method to examine knowledge integration and collaboration among team members in disciplinary diverse and geographically dispersed teams (Schröter et al., 2023). Our application of Star and Greisemer’s framework attends to the process of scientific work from the viewpoint of the excluded (Star, 2010). In our research, this means paying explicit attention to peripheral communities involved in TD work, communities that have long been marginalized as more attention has focused on scientists, academics, and policy makers. In this presentation, we focus on the issue of articulation work (Bowker et al., 2015)—work that allows ‘keeping things on track in transdisciplinary projects’. Articulation Work involves organizing and doing the myriad tasks needed to coordinate a particular project task. That is articulation work helps implement unstated assumptions or reconcile incommensurable procedures to get any frontline/on the ground job done (Timmermans & Freidin, 2007).

Drawing upon four cases of long-term global environmental change TD research in Colombia, Panama, Jamaica and Brazil, we describe the roles of key community members who act as brokers, intermediaries, mediators and liaisons. These individuals facilitate the exchange of knowledge and resources among epistemologically diverse communities and coordinate efforts across boundaries of work.