Interactivity Matters: A Role of External Representations in Knowledge Transfer During Participatory Design Workshops

Today, our society faces many societal challenges with high uncertainty and complexity that a single person cannot solve. We have gradually recognized diverse stakeholders including non-professionals need to gather and co-create solutions collaboratively to tackle the challenges. One of the difficulties of such participatory workshops with diverse participants is its knowledge transfer. To establish a foundation for discussion, participatory workshops would require transferring appropriate evidence-based external representations of
knowledge utilized both by experts and non-experts in a co-creation process. This paper investigates the impacts of three different external representations of knowledge through 12 social innovation workshops with three distinct agendas. Our experiments show that evidence-based knowledge was often appropriately transferred. However, surprisingly spontaneous, and interactive
knowledge had more significant impacts than authoritative descriptive knowledge in shaping final ideas. This result indicates external representation of knowledge transferred at workshops should be designed with greater sensitivity and special attention to achieve intended outcomes