I have been very fortunate when it comes to engaging with the various sectors beyond my immediate research and development domain. Interdisciplinary collaboration really is the way forward towards impacting various societal needs. By collaborating with individuals from the different sectors, it is life-enriching as we are not experts of everything. Individual expertise coming together leads to collective creativity, intelligence, intervention and innovation.
Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) has recently been awarded the EU Horizon 2020 funding for a 3-year Coordination and Support Action project, called Bond. Bond stands for Bringing Organisations and Network Development to Higher Levels in the Farming Sector in Europe.
…BOND’s general objective is to directly contribute to unleash, strengthen, and organise, the great potential for collective action and networking of individuals, groups and entities of farmers and land managers in selected countries across Europe, with a view to creating strong, dynamic and effective organizations that have a voice and a place in policy design. Through the benefits of working with others, extending interactions with multiple actors, the project will help foster human well-being, the management of landscapes, agricultural growth and a vigorous social capital throughout Europe.
Bond DoA 2017
When the proposal was still under development, I had many conversations with the coordinator Dr. Angela Hilmi on how playful and gameful approaches can be repurposed for developing participatory programmes that will facilitate the ‘bonding, bridging and linking’ of the relevant stakeholders in the farming sector. Being an advocate of a more holistic approach for implementing gamification, the role of gamification in the project is very much driven by the needs. Our main aim is to exploit our expertise in designing and implementing solutions that are inspired by games and play. Such solutions can be applied to different domains and in this case, they will be implemented and tested with the aim for facilitating community building, conversations and identification of challenges associated to the farming industry; specifically concerning the relevant stakeholders and the specific needs to be identified by the other tasks in the project. This work will link to one of the main objectives where non-digital gaming interface will be explored towards overcoming barriers between farmers and other actors, such as decision makers. In this task, we aim to design different playful and participatory programme/activities that will facilitate common understanding and to build constructive alliances. We will very much remix and repurpose activities designed and developed within the Disruptive Media Learning Lab’s GameChangers programme.
The kick-off meeting in Brussels (7-8 Nov) was pretty intense but exciting. We facilitated two playful sessions (designed in a couple of hours!) at the kick-off as part of the team building and the data collection activities. The sessions were well received as an introduction to how we could be inspired by play and games for designing participatory programmes.
I am looking forward to working with the consortium. Samantha Clarke will be joining me as the “creative producer and researcher” 🙂
Slides used at the kick-off:
Sylvester Arnab 