Our research
The TD School’s uniquely collaborative approach to research combines academic knowledge from multiple disciplines with applied knowledge from industry. Research undertaken at the TD School focuses on four key themes: futures, sustainable societies, technology and humanity, and transformative learning.
Transdisciplinary (TD) research is primarily a process than it is a product. In plain terms, it typically involves:
- Mixing academic knowledges from multiple disciplines
- Mixing applied knowledges through collaboration with industry
- Co-design with stakeholders, including end-users through a human-centred approach
Through that approach, transdisciplinary research does more than generate publications. Because engagement with stakeholders is built in from the design stages of research projects, it inherently involves mutual learning, engagement and impact for all parties involved. TD methods result in the co-production of knowledge by the people in the project, resulting in new insights and new ways of working.
TD research is ideally suited to problem spaces that are open, complex, dynamic and networked. It goes beyond solving discrete problems by opening doors to new questions and digs deeper at root causes instead of targeting symptoms.
In many cases, the solution is unknown or even unknowable at the start of a project. TD research, therefore, requires keeping an open mind about its direction. The impact of the project may also emerge during or long after the project. This requires a shift in mindsets from competing about owning a problem or solution towards collaboration. This is also a shift from seeking answers towards embracing curiosity, as well as a shift from focussing on outputs towards outcomes.
We often harness the potential of TD research by integrating it in our learning and teaching by presenting industry challenges as in-class pilot studies. Students benefit from learning and applying TD research methods. Industry partners benefit from early insights by students and opportunities to recruit bright minds. Researchers benefit from in-class pilot studies by getting to know the industry partners, the challenges they face.
At TD School, we are broadly interested in numerous TD research methods. Within TD School, we have identified four research themes for us to focus on. Meanwhile, we simultaneously enable other research teams across UTS to include TD methods in their projects (aka ‘powered by TD School’).
Watch this video by our Director of Research Martin Bliemel at Res Hub Launch, on Transdisciplinary research as an impact engine: What is it? What does it mean for end-user engagement? How does TD School enable it across UTS?
Thank you for joining us in person and online. Good to see familiar faces
So I might actually talk too quickly and end up early. If that's ok. Or also leave time for discussion and Q&A. That's not intentional. It's simply a habit. I like to talk quickly.
So the topic is generally, what is TD research? What does it mean for end-user engagement with the rest of the university?
And in a way, this is sort of a mini launch or re-launch event of TD School.
So, for context (Let's try this. There we go.) TD could mean a whole bunch of different things. As sort of an inside joke, we're playing around with different acronyms that TD could represent.
To us it's often "to do" because there is so much that can be done, but it is very much transdisciplinarity.
So, for context, FTDi was created as a faculty. It's a very new organisation. It's the first time the university has created a new faculty in decades.
It was launched off the back of an undergraduate coursework programme.
And it's that coursework foundation through which it teaches students and to another extent, industry partners involved in the coursework about transdisciplinary methods to collaborate towards innovation.
Since then we've been launching our HDR program and a few other new courses. And our research programme is still evolving rapidly.
A lot of us have come into this new unit from different backgrounds. So, from FASS, from Business, from design, from science, from engineering .... So a lot of us are actually as individuals, still relatively new to transdisciplinarity.
Just to reinforce the VCs message that the faculty is transforming into a School.
Think of this, roughly in the same sense as the Graduate Research School as the entity's structure. In that, it's similar to a faculty but really meant to break down silos across faculties. So hopefully that will become clearer as the talk goes on.
[Switching to handheld mic. Hi Lesley].
And so what TD is, in a nutshell, the way we boil it down based on what we see in the international literature. It's not like it has the word disciplinarity in there, but it's not just mixing academic disciplines.
It's also mixing in multiple professional practises. So that's the legal professions, engineering professions, the routines and behaviours that industry uses, right through to individual end-users like consumer level stuff.
So, I'll also push back a little bit on what an end-user is, is it just the industry partner? Or is it the people who will ultimately use whatever product or service for innovation you're bringing out.
I don't know if you've seen the Impact at UTS podcast series that was launched late last year. It had a bonus episode for the Vice Chancellor's Awards (the research awards).
So here are some quotes from Stuart White and Cam that I picked out that provide two similar but very complimentary takes on what TD is.
The problems, they're not chemistry problems or mathematics problems for engineering or sociology problems. They're just problems and so we need a team of people with different disciplinary backgrounds.
So that's emphasising the multiple academic disciplines in there.
Just to complement that it should be viewed from a systems point of view. That's the first and most important thing.
The second is to do the research and design the research in a collaborative way to make sure that we are gaining knowledge from firstly, the participants in the problem, which are often the clients and stakeholders, community and so on.
So to recognise that there are many different forms of knowledge, it doesn't just come from journal articles, which is often the focus on academic research, but it actually comes from stakeholders engaged in the activities that we're investigating.
So the first thing is to work very closely with clients and stakeholders to do it in a collaborative way.
And then to make sure that that research is used in some way, that it's promoted, that it's communicated, that it's transparent, and that we're getting the fruits of that research, the outcomes of that research out to the people who need to see it.
So that's a piece about the production of knowledge and the communication of knowledge. And that's extremely important to us because (A) it helps create change.
And (B), it's a responsibility of researchers to make sure that the outcomes and the fruits of their research are shared widely and do create that change. So that a few things that stick out for that one is it's the active involvement of the end-users and the industry partners
And not just doing the research and then translating it to them, but it's bringing them in into the project almost right at the very beginning and designing the study with them. So you're designing the scope of the study with them. And the new knowledge that's being generated is co-produced with them.
So it's not necessarily the academics doing their analysis and having these aha moments and saying, by the way, dear industry, have you noticed this? So that's kind of what TD researcher is.
Why is it important or when is it useful?
The OECD published a nice report in January, sorry, June last year, thankfully acknowledging UTS and its efforts. And it's often for complex societal challenges.
So not every, not every problem is suitable for transdisciplinary methods. Sometimes the degree to which you bring in industry partners and the professions and multiple disciplines overshoots the scope of a project.
That's where some projects might actually be better as interdisciplinary, or mono-discipline, etc.
Kees Dorst, one of the professors at our faculty, describes some of the methods or methodologies around this as: these are problem spaces that are open, the complex, dynamic and networked.
So if you're dealing not just with a fixed problem, but something that is very complex and involves multiple moving parts, that's more likely to be amenable and yield more interesting results with TD research.
So as a more concrete example:
As an allergy suffer, I like to pick on this one here. So sometimes you're just in there. You've got a problem. Runny nose sneezing, whatever. So you say: ‘I just want some tissues’. But really, if you expand that to not just a problem, but a problem space and looking at the causes and consequences of all the parts and moving involved in this, you can magnify this to much larger societal level challenge.
Some industry people are open-minded about this. They say: ‘actually, wait, I do want to take a step back to see if I'm treating the symptoms are the causes’.
And other industry partners just say: ‘look, I just want this algorithm or I just want this solution’.
So there's a bit of a give and take. And it's also the willingness to step into a space where you're not the expert with other industry partners, some industry partners want to own a problem or challenge, and other ones are happy to involve others in the – broadly spoken - ecosystem, sometimes including their competitors too.
This then also says, off the back of that, everyone comes into this with a different frame of mind. So each of those partners has their own methodology, their own frameworks, like whether it's chemical, pharmacological, and computational.
So this is where the disciplinary perspectives sort of come through, the perspectives of the stakeholders.
So really when you're looking at a problem, step back to see, okay, is the problem that you're looking at just a symptom of a much larger problem space. And that can help you think through the degrees for which you might want to start adopting multi or cross disciplinary or transdisciplinary methods.
At the very end I've got a good example where somebody has focused initially on a very interesting problem, initially adopted in inter-, or cross-disciplinary perspective, when in reality, it effectively could have been managed as a transdisciplinary method. She’s (the researcher) nonetheless yielded amazing results.
I always wonder if she could have gotten those results faster or gotten even better results with a more nuanced approach.
Here's another quick soundbite about 'why'.
These issues need to be solved. We can't stand by and continue to work in a model which is rarefied and separated from those pressing issues of the world and not be influenced by them and not take part in them.
I think there is a general trend. We see that in certainly younger people coming through who want to have a purpose, they're much more purpose-driven rather than thinking.
I'll have a standard academic career, PhD, postdoc, publications, lecturer, and so on.
There's much more of a hunger for I want to be making a change in the world. And that means I have to operate in a different way.
I like this quote because it picks on the motivations of the individual.
And it also takes in consideration for stage of development, some ECR as they have that desire to change the system, not the climate built-in except when they land their first academic job, then they're up against the traditional KPIs.
So they've got to reconcile that mid-career researchers are probably. Almost a little bit of a lost cause, of just trying to get to the next stage.
Some of them are a bit more open-minded. Late career researchers are interesting.
I was once part of a mentoring scheme where I had a full professor and we were reverse mentoring each other.
And he basically said, Look, I've already got the publications, I've got the grants, I've got to post docs. What am I doing?
I've got the patents. What am I doing? Am I doing with the rest of my career? How, how am I actually making society.. improving society?
So here's a quote back to the individual level that reinforces this one by Emma Camp, who's the Chancellor's Postdoctoral research fellow around the coral clip.
[whoops. I thought there was an audio link to that one. ]
This is my passion. I just can't bear the thought that I would tell my children that our generation knew that [the reef] was dying and didn't do anything to help it. I want to - through my research and my actions - ensure the reef is conserved into the future.
That kinda just screams that people choose a career usually for its purpose rather than just because they're good at it. And they can perform to traditional KPIs.
Quick show of hands. I know there are only four of you plus online. How many of you have seen this framework?
Oh, this is kind of a core part of the UTS research strategy.
Conventional KPIs, often just focus on the inputs, the grant dollars in and the outputs, the publications out.
What we're trying to do is change the conversation to say, actually, these outputs need to be translated.
Or you can do the research and the way that has the engagement built in to then get to the point where you're achieving some sort of outcomes - actual commercial outcomes, societal outcomes beyond the academic outcomes - that then translate into some sort of impact right down at the human level, at the level of the individuals.
So each of these matters.
There is also, I guess, screaming at you right there that this is a cycle, to go from inputs to outputs and then translate them further and generate the goodwill.
Therefore, you get better industry engagement.
People are more likely to fund your next round of research and then the virtual cycle continues [oops] virtuous cycle continues.
But that's not necessarily the case that it's a cycle.
So they can, you can embed engagement right into the research project rather than do the research and then engage with industry to say, Hey, how would you like to use my findings?
So that's, that's one thing here, a key, one of the key parts of TD research is it's with people rather than for people.
I just wrapped up a research project with a local council and interestingly but they almost had that assumption built-in that..
Well we're commissioning you to the research, can you just do it and check in with us from time to time and tell us the results at the end.
But the fun part is as we get to the end, then they want to iterate very quickly on the report.
Oh, can you do this bit and do this bit .
Well, actually we could do that all the way along.
And consider you as a collaborator an active collaborator on the research project.
So this is straight out of a 2016 article that's .. They're reviewing the impact of co-production of knowledge using transdisciplinary methods.
And they're finding yes, it has higher stakeholder engagement. That's almost by definition built into TD. Therefore it also has higher knowledge integration.
So industry partners who are participating as that new knowledge is being generated, they're able to integrate it faster and change their practises.
And that then leads to the use of that knowledge too.
But TD is not easy.
Like could say, great, just involve people early on and iterate with them faster.
But it's not that easy.
There's a reason why it's a bit challenging.
There are actually ..I forget what DARPA stands for again [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] but they've got a classification of DARPA hard problems that are, by definition very difficult because they required multi- or transdisciplinary methods that there is no known answer.
And the DARPA criteria almost completely match the criteria that were spelled out off the back of a major transdisciplinary summit that was summarised in this article where they said, Okay, let's, let's define complex problems in a bit more with a bit more specificity and the challenges of exploring complex problems spaces.
So one of them is just defining where do you set the boundaries?
Is it I just need a tissue?
Or is it the whole of society in medical practises and medical regulations and everything?
Then the next two bullet points almost work against each other.
You've got to figure out, okay, if, once you've specified who is in or out of this problem space, how do you determine who is the expert in that space?
But then how do you park their expertise?
Because you don't want somebody who's too loud in that space saying I'm the expert. I know all the answers.
You want people to be bringing their expertise into space, but also be humble that they're not, they don't have the solution, that they're recognising the expertise of everyone else in the room equally.
In the podcasts, you'll hear them talk a bit more [about it] as a deliberate democracy.
So as you bring people into a workshop, you have to let them recognise anywhere down from the end user, like the individual person who needs a tissue has an equal voice in making sense of this whole societal wide issue.
As do government authorities, medical practitioners, et cetera. Every voice matters.
The next bit is to then whittle it back down to say, Okay, now that we've gone wide to embrace everyone and everything that could be part of the problem space is to then say, okay, what's, what's within our control?
What levers can we pull in which levers are completely beyond our control? What can't we change just yet?
And also looking at even just what's the next step.
We might not be able to solve the entire issue, but can get these iterate on this and conduct a smaller test and contain it, contain the issue a bit more.
Let's look at allergy treatment.
But then when isolated rural area before expanding out to the whole of Australia.
And then there's also...
So that's just, TD is hard because of the nature of the complex problems that you're addressing.
But then it's also institutionally difficult.
That there are structural issues that can make it challenging for TD research to happen, such as traditional KPIs that prescribe a list of journals that you should be publishing in, [KPIs] that quantify the number of publications and citations you're collecting.
So the journals you're publishing and may not necessarily have that same ..land the same citations that say that your supervisors or deans may be looking for.
And some, some KPIs actually favour mono disciplinarity [sorry] mono-disciplinary journals, but also sole author publications.
So you collect more the HERDC points, but trans-disciplinary stuff because we're involving somebody, people who are co-producing knowledge, tend to have more co-authors
So there is some tension between traditional KPIs which are actually not that old, and TD research.
And then also things like FOR codes. If you're, if you're developing a grant or an ethics application, who are you going to ask to review it?
That's usually specified through the FOR code structures. So there are challenges with that one too.
I think there is an interdisciplinary FOR code, but it's just not well thought through.
Some of that then has implications for workload models. And some people also question like how is this [replicable]..where is the methodological rigour?
Because when you're exploring a problem space with all these stakeholders, your research is so context-specific that might not be portable to another context.
So your findings might not be portable to another context, but hopefully the method of exploring a complex context is more replicable [bleh .. replicable]. [bit of a mouthful].
But we'll get to the TD research methodologies versus .. I guess doing TD research versus pushing the frontier of research methods, TD research methods.
We'll try and separate those a bit more.
The agenda of this here is more just to encourage people to do more TD research using the current best practises of TD methods.
While I'm personally pushing with and TD School to get our academics to push the frontier of TD methods. And I'll visualise that a little bit later.
So how and when research happens, it happens through this deliberate democracy. It just often just simply requires listening. Listening to the end-user, listening to each other. That takes time. You can't force it.
You can't have somebody in there saying Innovate, be creative, transdisciplinate!
It's just not going to happen the, the moments at which you get that convergence of knowledge or synthesis of knowledge.
And that those moments where you actually are generating new knowledge, you're not going to have that for months and months and months at a time.
You can, you can provide the opportunities for people to have those opportunities to generate new knowledge. You can't force them.
So TD research can kind of go through these, these waves of ebbs and flows.
Quite often it's the most transdisciplinary part of it is when you're meeting with clients, consultants, industry partners, and actually scoping of the project is.
That's where you're having a lot, so much dialogue back and forth that, that process of scoping the project is to some extent the transdisciplinary phase of it.
Then it might go off and do your bit and then go through a second phase of transdisciplinary research in reviewing the intermediate results are the final results.
And then trying to collectively make sense of what's going on of a situation.
So there are ..the level of transdisciplinarity on a product can go, can go through several ebbs and flows.
There are some long laundry list of methods.
A lot of them are related to qualitative research methods to really tease out people's impressions, opinions.
Except at the end of the day or you're looking for things that have impact on society, which involves people, which inherently involves perceptions and subjective realities rather than objective realities.
So we've got Kees Dorst who's championing the frame creation method, which is based on design philosophy.
And Kees wrote up basically what we do in the BCII, which is more of a mixing and mashing up of methods. Where you take, take methods and you experiment with them to try and evolve them.
The next two blocks of methods here are based on that summit where they synthesised and summarised all the methods out there.
A lot of these are kind of systems level methods.
But the nuance of what makes them TD is more in how you apply them and who you're applying them with.
I mean, you could apply these just about any anywhere.
It wouldn't have to be TD.
But it's the nature of who .. which stakeholders you involve and when you involve them, that then enables that co-production of knowledge with those stakeholders.
Through which I guess the new knowledge that transcends the academic disciplines to be a new knowledge contribution.
Hence the word trans in there. So, it's transcending the disciplines not just merging.
It's already happening across UTS.
I don't know if you've seen the university's webpage www.uts.edu.au you just go to research, then 'explore'.
And there's a separate tile for transdisciplinarity.
That research webpage is no longer laid out according to faculty, it’s laid out according to societal problems.
And within transdisciplinarity, again, more societal problems and complex problems.
So a lot of these, these focus.. foci, are plucked straight from that page.
So ISF is quite well known in the space. More on the .. More on the approach of sustainability and energy.
You've then got the Climate Change Cluster that has their own, I guess, contexts in which they apply it.
To the digital science .. DSI, digital science Innovation Institute. Sorry, Digital Science Institute. They've got a project in there that's more around digital learning.
Antimicrobial resistance is also kinda one of the big things. It's not just about the bacteria, but it's the use of methods and processes to contain that.
CIC has a mention in there around human-centered design versions of learning and data analytics service. Mixing up of AI, machine learning data analytics and the human side of it.
You heard earlier from Cam Tonkinwise from the School of Design, DAB. They've got a huge plethora of very diverse projects, each involving a separate complex problem.
Within TD school, we've focused, we're focusing on four themes.
So futures, sustainable societies, technology & humanity. So it's sort of ethics and AI fits in that one as well.
And transformative learning.
So hopefully in the near future you'll be hearing more from us on, on those.
Our website has just been refreshed this last week, which has more specific case studies and projects up those.
And you'll notice a lot of these are at the unit of at the level of a units in UTS.
But there are, of course many, many individuals and their collaborators and teams could do transdisciplinary research.
So it's happening.
The question to UTS is how do we, how do we coordinate it in a more sophisticated way rather than just letting it mushroom?
This is what TD research is not.
So I plucked the the Figured out of one of Paul Nightingale's articles.
So he, he's the, one of the directors of SPRU the Science Policy Research Unit in UK.
They do a lot of kind of deep thinking about the, I guess the paradigms in science and this article is more about inter- and multi-disciplinary research.
And if it's just taking a problem and dissecting it and looking at it from different disciplines.
And everyone looking at it from their own perspective, you're not actually getting people to have that shared language, lingua franca of what is it as a whole that we're looking at?
So that's more inter-and multidisciplinary. I'm sorry, cross- and multi-disciplinary where it's largely a coordination of individual sub-projects, almost what we're leaning towards.
So here it's still phrased interdisciplinary, but I'd say it borders on transdisciplinary, is that there is some team or some unit in the middle.
This green tile here that actually is a synthesis of multiple academic disciplines.
Where this would then become transdisciplinary is where it's not just the integration of multiple disciplines, but also involving more of the end-user and the co-production of knowledge with the end-user.
So in that regard, so this is still interdisciplinary.
In the short-term, TD School will aim to be more of a broker, simply because we're a tiny unit and the rest of the universe's huge.
But as we build capacity, we will have more staff or more people who can really help lead those projects and be a central contributor to these university-wide projects.
Like I said, remember this slide from before.
So this is why it's not quite transdisciplinary.
So it's, yes, it is mixing of the academic knowledges.
Not just coordinating them, but it's not quite.. mixing, integrating the… the professional practises.
The inter-disciplinary part .. I would have thought that could be covered by all these institutes we have. So the CRCs and the AI institute. And so if they're not engaging with industry ..
So this is where it'll get interesting in about four slides of what does applied interdisciplinary or applied multi-disciplinary research look like where it is mixing of one or more .. or two or more disciplines.
And it's applied.
When we're doing research on Robert Langer, the world's most cited, most patented, most published, engineer to date, like is the Edison of medicine.
One thing that stood out is that is that he actually fits the Pasteur Topology quite nicely.
That he is looking for very basic research questions, but also applying them right away.
So he's kind of the brains behind Moderna as well.
It's kind of helping him get more exposure.
He's raised billions of dollars, launched dozens of startup companies in the process, runs the world's largest research lab at MIT.
When I was looking for research on Pasteur's quadrant, it turns out there's a Tijssen has got this fresher version which is actually not just applied versus basic, but the level of engagement as well.
So the depth of engagement with industry partners kind of comes through.
You can still be in Pasteur's quadrant thinking about the application of your research but not necessarily engaging with the end-users.
So the more you actually engage with the end-users in the industry and immerse yourself in that implied environment, the more you're likely to I guess slide or gravitate towards TD.
[.. Quantum Sydney ..] Not sure. Yeah.
I'm not that familiar with that organisation just yet.
But I'd have to have a look at them.
They're the ones who collaborate with the across universities but also with Commbank they're 4 universities combined.
They're quantum stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah and the government gave them [..] bucks
Question is, are they ..[.. collaborate well] it's lots of researchers coming together.[Microsoft's involved ..]
So the question is, what's the level of involvement with them?
They just throwing money into it or they actually like actively collaborate.
I guess so then it could be, could be transdisciplinary if they're inventing a science of quantum computing not just science of molecular physics.
Good question.
Hopefully my next couple of visualisations will help out.
So this review of researchers, but they did is they looked at a global datasets of scientists, engineering… I guess researchers in science, in sciences and engineering, and categorise them according to their activities, whether they're just publishing or whether the publishing and patenting.
Well, they are involved in the commercialization cycles.
To categorise them in this three-dimensional topology, what they found is the more you're up in the top right, you will actually have more publications.
So that actually does start to play into traditional KPIs. You will then also have more co-authorship.
So you, simply because you're collaborating more but your collaborations will also be more international and involve more non-academics.
Yeah, and it just kind of becomes a sort of self-perpetuating engine of a research excellence with impact.
True to the tagline of the UTS research strategy.
And more field-weighted research citations too
One of the conceptual limitations of this here is that it still emphasises the solo entrepreneur, the solo academic scientist.
But it is actually a team effort and that comes through the metrics of co-authorship.
So back to those definitions.
So teasing out a bit more nuance .. So it's the mixing of the academic knowledge has been not just coordinating them, but really aiming for them to be integrating and talking a common language.
And also pulling in collaborators from industry and end-users.
Multiple sectors, not just a Microsoft, but maybe multiple people and co-designing it.
So getting the industry stakeholder new user involvement as early as possible. And recognising the end-user
There is some jargon difference between the end-user is.
I think research office looks at the, the end user as whoever is paying your level research.
But that's not necessarily who will be the end beneficiary of the research.
So if you're filing for research ethics, you often have to think in terms of beneficence.
That then starts to get more like who's the actual person at the end, at the end of the day who will benefit from the research?
In terms of how can TD school help?
We've started off circling back to the very beginning like what's the history of TD School?
We started off as starting off a coursework programme for transdisciplinarty ..for students to learn transdisciplinarity.
Now also at the master's level and short courses.
So we've got that dialled in. So it's built into students' curriculum. It's not just bolted on.
So we're launching a set of transdisciplinary electives that students will take in their second year.
That way they're thinking about transdisciplinary applications of their own knowledge or practises of their own knowledge by the time they graduate, rather than this random thing that happens just before the graduate and they're just looking for the job.
And so what UTS is trying to do is think that through at the university level too.
How do we enable even some researchers to become more sophisticated in terms of designing their research in a way that has that impact engagement built in from the beginning rather than bolted on at the end?
So TD School is well poised to be that pan-university Centre.
So almost like the TD extension of ResHub effectively to help anyone across UTS learn more about TD research and do more TD research.
And we can then almost study those researchers as Guinea pigs to evolve the methodology behind TD research.
So this is where I hope it just kinda really clarifies some things.
So everyone's familiar with .. there's a person, a faculty, faculty in this case. And they just simply working on their disciplinary knowledge, fantastic, good on them.
Good way to maybe start a career, build a foundation within your discipline. Then it might be industry funded or interacting with industry. They get new ways of working out of it. So that's applied disciplinary research.
Then you get multidisciplinary research where there might be somebody coordinating it. But there's a big problem. It might not have to be complex problems, simply a complicated problem that can be broken down. And people working at it from multiple angles.
That visualisation comes back into mind.
Then this is where things get interesting.
If it's still just coordinating or taking a larger problem and breaking it down into bits and pieces. And having industry partners input from time to time.
That's not necessarily the co-production of knowledge.
It's, it's if it's still just breaking things down and coordinating it, it would still just be applied multidisciplinary research.
Once you get through to actually bringing in the industry partners as equals into a project and co-producing the knowledge with them. That's when it then flips over to something that's transcending those disciplines to generating new knowledge.
And so what we're aiming for is a way to .. building a,..building the capacity within TD School and therefore also at UTS to help coordinate and do this type of research so that we can find the academics across UTS.
I think we now have 800 industry partners within our school alone. Many of whom are already friendly to TD research or our TD methods through the..,through the coursework industry partnerships.
And can we coordinate other people who are interested in this industry partners who are interested in this bring them into a common space and we get the team to do the research, while we study the process of the research.
That way we push the frontier on the transdisciplinary research methods, academics can push their disciplinary knowledge.
Partners walk away with the...their new ways of working.
There are two ways about this.
One is kind of self-serving. TD school has these four research areas.
So for those research areas, we already .., we're declaring them as a research foci because we have expertise in them.
So we're more likely to have, not just the process expertise of collaborating, but also some subject matter expertise.
And we'll pull in any missing subject matter expertise from, from friendly folks around the rest of the university, working with the partners, of course.
Then the next bit which we're aiming to get to is powered by or supported by TD School.
Where maybe all we need to do is play more of a brokerage model, play a role in the design of the methods.
Evaluate the impact of the methods, or the outcomes on the methods. Really push the methodological advancement, while we have another TD partner in there to do more of the doing of TD research rather than the evaluation of TD research.
If that makes sense.
I see some heads nodding but also maybe question marks.
So that's that's the grand master plan overall.
We're hoping to get to the next and possibly the short-term for smaller projects, but also eventually the longer term as we, as we grow.
So how can TD school help? Coming soon
Hopefully brokering these relationships with our industry partners and making that a two-way flow, that we can partner with academics and industry and make it go back and forth.
So we'll try and make liberal use of this [ResHub] space to do that too.
So, Kate, ResHub, if you're watching, thanks to the space, you'll hear more of us soon.
And I'm also working on the project management side.
So some researchers just want to do the research and that's fine. Do not necessarily want to test the grants. They don't want to have to manage their relationships with funders.
We can potentially take on more of that role too. Sliding a bit more on the administrative side. But also doing that research design with you.
So think of it like an internal .., internal research consultant where one of our staff members comes, and joins a research team, informs you how to do the research better.
Maybe checks in with you every once in a while and sees how its going.
So that's doing the research design for the team. Ideally also with the team.
A pet project of mine that I'd like to get it to is evaluating some of these existing research projects that are already .. that are happening across UTS to see how did they apply the methods and how could they have applied it better? or to which degree are people already doing TD research?
So that video clip you saw earlier was Emma camp. So this is off the website that recently featured her and [grasping for names]...But Professor David Suggett, Professor David Suggett's work.
So the two of them are, are working on this here.
There's a, an impact at UTS podcast episode on them as well.
And what really stood out as we developed that podcast episode is, yes, they're focusing on the coral clip, which lets you take a piece of coral, reattach it so the coral and it'll regrow.
But what's happened out of that, while focusing on this product and the regrowth of a small piece of coral, is they've actually ended up working with a lot of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation a lot of tourism operators.
And they've changed the structure of the tourism industry there.
Tourists don't just show up and go to the reef, take pictures and leave. They actually show up, feel good about participating in coral farming and creating the coral reef and get charged for the privilege, right?
Yeah, so what they did they transformed ecotourism industry.
So in effect, that is so engaged with the end-users that I would say this is, .. qualif...fits within that criteria of being transdisciplinary research.
It might be slow-motion transdisciplinary disciplinary research that's evolved over time. But I would happily say that this is an amazing example of it.
Now the science that is coming out of it is largely marine biology and very biological research, not necessarily research about the methods, the, I guess this the collaboration methods through which they got to this point.
So I'd love to pick their brains and write-up
Tell me the story of how you got the government to help you fund 100 thousand corals to be planted all during COVID times as well.
And lastly, active collaboration within your teams; not just being the consultant to a team, to say here's how you can be a bit transdisciplinary but actually implanting, having somebody being sort of an interlope or within research projects and being actively involved in projects that are outside our four foci.
And of course, true to TD methods, I'm open for discussion, open for suggestions like if you see opportunities to co-creating the opportunities to collaborate, and how TD School can help you. I'm all ears.
So I think that's it.
So I was going to say watch this space, but 'watch this space' suggests that you're just sitting there passively watching.
Let's co-design and space!
For further reading about transdisciplinary research, we recommend our Open Access Special Issue on Transdisciplinary Innovation in the Technology Innovation Management Review.
We also recommend listening to episode 5 of the Impact at UTS podcast Breaking Out of Your Research Silo (opens Apple podcasts).
Our research themes
At TD School, we have chosen to focus on four key themes:
Futures
We take a near and far future-focused approach to thriving amidst complex challenges. Our research aims to understand drivers of change and identify opportunities through creative and pragmatic collaborations. It contributes to developing novel insights, transdisciplinary futures frameworks, innovative practices and experiences across diverse contexts, including work, health and sustainability. How will we work, learn, thrive and play in the future? How can we best anticipate and respond to uncertainty, and create change, to ensure regenerative wellbeing for humanity and the planet? Learn more about Futures theme.
Sustainable Societies
The primary objective of the Sustainable Societies theme is to act as enablers for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our primary research investigates the barriers and enablers to sustainable development in targeted problems spaces, which are chosen by mutual agreement with our partners, stakeholders and funding agencies. We engage in projects which facilitate mutual learning between key university, industry, government and civil society stakeholders. Our projects are prioritised based on our expertise and where new knowledge generated from our work may have an impact. Learn more about Sustainable Societies theme.
Technology and Humanity
Technology can transform the way we live our lives – as much in positive as in negative ways – and redefine what it means to be human. How can we ensure that technological change happens responsibly and that it promotes an equitable and sustainable society? Learn more about Technology and Humanity theme.
Transformative Learning
Research in this theme investigates the transformative potential of learning for individuals, organisations, and society. We learn from, and with stakeholders across all stages of their lives and careers, to co-create research that builds new practices, new models of learning and a fresh ambition for the future of learning in our society. Learn more about Transformative Learning theme.
Email us at TDSchool.RO@uts.edu.auto understand how you could participate in one of our projects and courses.