Tangible Thinking – Materialising how we Imagine and Understand Systems, Experiences, and Relationships

This workshop explored how ‘tangible thinking’ tools can be used to materialise how people imagine and understand systems, in particular questions of (inter) disciplinarity. Thirty-five participants used three different kinds of tools—topological, relational, and performative, to construct physical models supporting group discussion around how we conceptualize and experience “disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity”—abstract ideas that regulate and structure many of our lives as designers and researchers working in systemic contexts, in practice and in academia. In this working paper, we pay attention to the materials used, and their properties, alongside the affordances of physical modelling itself, as a way of externalising thinking in ways which could be shared and discussed together; we explain the background thinking behind the workshop, and illustrate some of the results.