Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

Case Study: Theatres of Thinking
Events such as workshops and sandpits are commonplace, especially during early
phases, in interdisciplinary enterprises. However, the conduct of such events shows
varying degrees of expertise. The most successful bring professional experience from
outside both academia and business, often involving skills in theatre or design.
Attempts to run such events without sufficient expertise can jeopardise an initiative
from the outset.
Tom Inns, director of the interdisciplinary research programme Designing for the 21st
Century is a leading expert. His ‘theatres of thinking’ are facilitated design workshops
involving a wide range of physical media, drawing on his own professional
background as a designer.
They have been central to his work as programme director, with programme phases
marked by workshops at which objectives are reviewed from across the multiple
disciplinary perspectives of the programme.
In a typical workshop, participants identified drivers of change for the field over the
coming 15 years. They identified new knowledge and understanding would then be
needed, modeled potential research project ideas in 3 dimensions on a large floor size
portfolio map, then used that map to explore the criteria to evaluate and select projects
for funding.
http://www.theatresofthinking.org.uk/
5.4.2 Visual representation and rhetoric
New conceptualisations can be supported by the construction of visual representations
either as boundary objects shared by members of a team (in Tom Inns’ workshops) or
as objects of communication and persuasion that contain their own internal rhetoric.
Novel visual representations can shift attention away from established disciplinary
understanding. If developed in a collaborative context, they can also provide an
opportunity for development of a shared mental model. We also heard reports of
occasions in which something is ‘gained in translation’, where expressing statements
in forms outside the established language of a particular discipline results in new
insights. However, it is necessary to be cautious about those situations in which
particular forms of visual representation have connotations arising from their
association with a particular disciplinary tradition (Crilly, Blackwell & Clarkson
2006). In that case, it may be the case that little is gained, because those from other
disciplines fail to understand the content, or (perhaps worse), interpret the use of a
particular representation as an unequal claim to authority. Quantitative graphs are
associated with science and engineering, Powerpoint presentations are associated with
corporate business contexts, and coloured expressive visualisation is associated with
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