Communication Design for Innovation Research

Transdisciplinary cross-sector collaborations between universities, government institutions,
profit-oriented companies and society provide multiple perspectives, experience and knowledge to solve a complex problem in a sustainable and satisfactory way, but also serve as the source of many tensions. To what extend are participants of collaborations willing and able to work together.

AI could support a collaborative network while they are not working together, which is an application of uncertainty management. The concept is as follows: when a human network meets, information, beliefs, ideas, will be shared amongst the group, appointments are made and actions are distributed in the network. The AI system running parallel with the team learns content wise and interaction wise, and continues the collaboration while the humans are not there and busy with other things (work/leisure). When the humans return, they take over the network and start where the collaborative AI system is at that moment. The humans see what is surprising, not needed, not understood and make corrections. Through this process they are able to reflect on their own actions and ideas, and discover what kind of tensions in the interaction where not seen by humans but detected by the AI system and be made explicit.

Current professionals face a challenging task: delivering added value for the organization. With 'being good at their job' or 'working hard' they will not get there. They have to perform in a rapidly changing world with many different, ever changing parties and different interests: an environment in which many plans are overtaken by reality.

Professionals must therefore be adaptive in order to handle their tasks properly and to prevent them from dropping out or getting burned out prematurely. How can students of Delft University of Technology be prepared for this practice? How to teach students to be adaptive?  In the master SEC, track CDI, adaptivity is one of the attainment levels of the program. In this respect CDI is unique; in other master curricula at Delft University of Technology hardly any attention is paid to adaptivity. Understanding adaptivity and applying the concept in the CDI curriculum has been a challenge. We use design-based research to understand the concept of adaptivity from different perspectives in various projects, together with students and stakeholders. We focus both at adaptivity of socio-technical systems and at adaptive expertise of professionals (individuals). Identifying uncertainties and ways to deal with them proves to be central on both levels. The concept of adaptivity has been incorporated throughout the CDI curriculum. At this moment, we are developing a method to evaluate to what extent adaptivity is actually an acquired competence of our students. Insights of our search can be used in the design of other curricula in which adaptivity is central.

Education for engineers changes partly through the technology that they developed. Engineers took part in changing our environment and now their own education is subject for research. How do future professionals become adaptive? How do they learn to collaborate and bridge between technology and society, practice, theory, ratio and intuition and still be an expert? The time that people just invent things by themselves, let alone innovations, lays far behind. Our master and minor are partly our own living lab in which we probe and try with our students and professionals in practice in an open and co-creative way. What if our CDI academic workplace called C-Lab is a nursery for future communication for collaboration?

Actually it is quite hard to make a start on this topic. The energy transition feels vast, impressive, much of the issues are far beyond our personal horizon. And that makes it so terribly difficult. How to make motivated and evidence-based decisions upon new energy technology, infrastructure, society, etc. in small and large networks of citizens and or government and industry? In a highly uncertain world we need to get rid of our obsolete energy habits and turn to new ones which are not clear yet? Needless to say that communication between all stakeholders is a necessity to gain insights. However, how to keep the collaboration in energy transition mind challenging, even provocative, immediate responsible? What if an uncertain world we research how stakeholders could respond in an adaptive and responsible way?

The way we live together in metropolitan areas will dramatically change. New ways of co-housing, transport, local/circular economy will contribute to social and environmental sustainable, responsible and inclusive communities. Collaboration is key to these developments. Inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration to develop new technology, and the development of new ways of collaboration between the people living in these metropolitan areas. What if we combine what we learn from both developments? Then the present will become a living lab.

There is an awful lot to say about new developments in these intriguing scientific and technological fields. Not only about the technological new horizons, but also new horizons for society, our ideas about ethics and for example privacy. And the word ‘network’ seems to be central to many of these developments. A computer distributed computer network (internet), distributed ledger technology (blockchain) and a distributed network of professionals and the larger public developing, using and/or discuss this new technology (eco-systems of innovation and business). This all seems logic and the networks do certainly have a conceptual overlap. But how people collaborate and become adaptive in these so called socio-technical networks is less obvious. What if we live the analogy of networks and actually really learn from this multidisciplinary angle and build tools that really help?

We don’t need to repeat what you probably already know about research to find ways to cure all kinds of serious diseases. About how to organize health for the future, and to distribute it fairly. But what we would like to emphasize is that within health in transition people do all this, professionals, patients, family and citizens. We collaborate in a way to hang on to our individual health, but also to take care of others. Our spouses, friends, family and society. Let alone the medical doctors and researchers who take care of a whole community. You may think about the idea that if researchers, biomedical engineers, medical doctors, patients and policy makers don’t collaborate effectively how this involves, people getting sick, get behind or even die. One of our research topics is on how communication for collaboration sustains collaborative communities of practice in which stakeholders co-create urgent health solutions. What if human measure solutions to create high-tech might just take another way of meeting each other?