Creative Charette: Enabling Collaboration in the AHRC Research Network, Transforming Thresholds

This paper outlines the practices used to facilitate knowledge exchange and creative collaboration in the research network, Transforming Thresholds, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We focus on the principles used to design the Creative Charette, a novel collaborative event which brought together an interdisciplinary team of academics with a range of museums and commercial partners to generate new knowledge about thresholds and to design, create, test, install and evaluate solutions to improve visitors’ first, on-site engagement with the museum. The experimental nature of the Charette allowed us to address the practical research question: What methods, media and principles best help facilitate collaborative knowledge exchange between diverse academic and non-HEI partners? We argue that rather than focusing on specific media or interactive formats, the scaffolding of knowledge exchange practices needs to attend to three key factors: choice of language, flexibility of media and environment, and choice of participants. The specific resources used to realise each scaffolding factor can vary according to context (e.g. how events are labelled, which media might be used or how teams can be composed), but as a transferable principle, each factor needs to balance innovation and familiarity in order to create common ground and draw together diverse expertise in productive ways.