ROUNDTABLE: a collaborative tool for multidisciplinary stakeholders
Group · 1 quartile · Collaborators: Jing-Cai Liu, Nick Voskuil
In this course, we were asked to design a collaborative tool for the Brabant Outcome Fund, a social innovation fund. The result is ROUNDTABLE: an embodied meeting tool to meant to facilitate collaboration between people from different disciplines who do not know each other. Each participant uses one side of the wooden circle, which has pins on it. This represents your side during the conversation. First, each participant writes down their skills on the memory blocks and places it in front of a pin from their side. Skills include knowledge, areas of expertise, and abilities. Then, the conversation starts. Participants can share skills with each other and talk about them. During the conversation, participants connect the colored threads on their side to the skills they are interested in, to discover whether they have common skills, for example. They can give examples of previous work they did during the conversation and playfully get to know each other. Finally, a transparent disk is placed over the network of threads that allows the participants to sketch over their network and highlight interesting overlaps. These steps can be repeated for “resources” and “contacts”, depending on how much time there is for the session. “Resources” can be material or immaterial things that could be implemented in a project. “Contacts” include the existing networks of the different participants.
The tool that we made really serves as a type of “collaboration canvas”, meaning that quite a lot of interpretation is left in the hands of the people who use it. This was quite a new experience for me, since most of the “useful” designs I created so far were perhaps less ambiguous. The user tests were more about exploring the meaning that people laid in what they did with our tool, and then trying to build upon that. The concept is based for a large part on a theory that I learned about in an Innovation Management course, namely effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2009). An effectual approach revolves around the questions “who am I?”, “what do I know?”, and “whom do I know?”. This makes effectuation a good lens when looking at the exploitation of contingencies. The “rounds” present in the concept (Skills, Contacts, and Resources) are directly based on this premise.
References
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2009). Effectuation: Elements of entrepreneurial expertise. Edward Elgar Publishing.