Colloquia

Summary

For solving complex problems, Transdisciplinary Approach (TDA) was coined. TDA deals with unifying different stakeholders' (academic, non-academic and public) knowledge together for creating and integrating it into a new knowledge and synthesising this new knowledge into a solution for solving problems.

However, currently, TDA is still at its infancy stage. There are often, a lot of problems when implementing it. As a result, the aim of the thesis is to create a tool which helps to alleviate the problems in regards to facilitation of TDA. For this purpose, the approach used in the thesis was conducting research to find the problems, selecting the main problems, creating solutions to the problems, testing the solution and improving the same. 

From the research it was found out that, for successful facilitation of TDA, a general framework was required along with a solution for creating common language. Furthermore, the expectations of the stakeholders from the approach, and the challenges for implementation were noted. These were converted into a list of requirements that formed the basis of design choices for the final designs. Based on these requirements, a TDA framework was created along with a solution for common language (Common Language Tool). For the practical implementation of the framework and for ease of facilitation, a Collaboration Tool was designed. A solution (Documentation and Assessment Tool) was designed for knowing when to use Common Language when working with the Collaboration Tool.

To evaluate the created designs, a collaborative testing was conducted with students. Most of the participants acknowledged the use of the tools in the testing session. At the same time some critical notes and improvements were also proposed. Based on these remarks, improvements were made in those parts of the different tools that were tested.