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Paper short abstract

In this study, a board game is created from 5 years of ethnographic data to understand how interdisciplinary scholars worked on a grant to create cultural change. Playing the game becomes a reflexive site of inquiry & knowledge production leading to a more nuanced conception of how change occurred.

Paper long abstract

How do engineers implement cultural change in an electrical and computer engineering department in response to receiving a National Science Foundation (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) grant? How do social scientists and engineers work together on an interdisciplinary project over time? To answer these questions, we created a board game from our ethnographic data, called the RED World of Change, played by the project team. We frame this paper as a Science and Technology Studies (STS) practice of making and doing. Where STS emphasizes the social, technical, and material conditions that shape each other, making and doing focuses on the embodied practices of how knowledge is made and unmade. In turn, the game acted as a simulation and reflexive site of inquiry of knowledge expressions, frictions, and travel that occurred for the duration of the grant. Playing the board game allowed the players to reflect on how they worked together and observe the collaborations and limitations of their own work that occurred. The game play was then folded back into our ethnographic field work and analysis. By acting as critical participants, we present an integrated understanding of how cultural change is made when actors are collaborative, self motivated, and stretch beyond the disciplinary boundaries and norms that define their field.