Participatory modeling: an ideal place for interdisciplinarity?
Participatory modeling seeks to engage a group of people in the design and development of a model. The ultimate goal is to better characterize a problem of concern and imagine collectively how to solve it.
In the field of environment in particular, participants from different disciplines and non-research stakeholders need to feel involved in the process, so they can express their own views, as well as better engage in collective decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to put the actors at the center of the research concerns, both in the model design and in the exploration of scenarios arising from the model.
In order to conduct such prospective approaches in a participatory manner, it is necessary to reduce the boundaries between disciplines, as well as between researchers and other stakeholders. Instead of accumulating and overlaying concepts, modeling can play a unique role in promoting interdisciplinarity. The model, gradually co-designed, becomes a mediation object that allows the participants to exchange viewpoints on the issue at hand and also to revise their own knowledge.
Read more at: http://i2insights.org/2016/04/07/participatory-modeling-for-interdisciplinarity/
- : Pierre Bommel