Andreas Wettre, Palak Dudani, and Birger Sevaldson
Jumping conversations are essential when working with complexity. We have been looking at how a gigamap works as a mediation tool. When working with transdisciplinary groups to utilize the different perspectives and competencies that such groups possess, we need to zoom in and out and move between different perspectives in a constant flow. This often leads to people talking past each other, and people start self-silencing to reduce frustration. However, this also causes the group to miss important information and perspectives. The traditional way of working around this is to look at one part at a time using PowerPoint presentations.
Unfortunately, this can prevent participants from seeing connections and how some elements might influence others. We have used our experience to describe how gigamaps and other visual tools help in conducting jumping conversations and using these in ways that are significant and desirable. In this way, we look at gigamapping from a meta-perspective and study how gigamapping affects a transdisciplinary group and will help overcome some of the challenges that occur with such groups when working with complexity.
Keywords: complexity, conversations, systems, perspective taking
