2026 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 94-103
Transdisciplinary approaches are essential for tackling the complex environmental issues that modern society faces. However, differences in perception between different disciplines can hinder collaboration. This study aimed to make explicit the underlying “hidden framing” of different disciplines by visualising differences in problem perception through relationship diagrams created in Visual Problem Appraisal (VPA) workshops. Relationship diagrams created by students from the disciplines of design, policy and science were analysed using visual framing theory. The actors were categorised and quantitatively examined for interdisciplinary differences, while their placement and relational expressions were qualitatively analysed. The results showed that the design field was characterised by attention to “stakeholder subjectivity”, the policy field focused on “environmental changes” by exploring intervention points through the depicting interrelationships, and the science field demonstrated a linear, problem centred causal reasoning approach that emphasised “facts”. VPA workshops proved to be an effective methodology for visualising differences in problem definition based on discipline, and demonstrated their potential to promote mutual understanding of different “ways of seeing problems” in transdisciplinary research.
