Welcome to Planet B

Co-designing transdisciplinary research questions to uncover super-wicked problems

Slide 1

Transdisciplinary Collaboration

A global experiment uniting 200 scholars from 70 countries to co-create research questions on climate change, technology, and society.

Global Impact

Conducted at Festival University, a joint initiative by JKU Linz and Ars Electronica, fostering the next generation of researchers tackling complex sustainability challenges.

Overview

Welcome to Planet B is an academic research paper published in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research (Taylor & Francis, 2025).
The project explores how multidisciplinary teams can co-design research questions around super-wicked problems, issues such as climate change that defy traditional solutions. Conducted during the Festival University 2022 in Linz, the study tested a new, inclusive framework for participatory knowledge production, blending perspectives from art, technology, and social science to imagine more equitable and decolonized futures.

Role: Co-Author
Year: 2022 – 2024
Institution: Johannes Kepler University Linz & Ars Electronica
Journal DOI: 10.1080/13511610.2024.2447849

The challenge

Traditional academic structures and Eurocentric paradigms often exclude marginalized perspectives, limiting innovation in climate-related research.
Our challenge was to design a participatory process that could bring together 200 students from vastly different disciplines and cultures – from computer science to anthropology – and help them co-create relevant, decolonized research questions.

results

The process resulted in three co-created research questions addressing decolonized knowledge production, equitable access to AI-driven climate insights, and the integration of systemic interdependencies into education. Beyond its academic output, the project’s most valuable result was methodological: it showed that knowledge creation can be both democratic and rigorous, bridging art, technology, and social sciences to shape a more inclusive and reflective model of future research.

academic contribution

  •  Three transdisciplinary research questions published in an academic journal.

  • Demonstrated a novel method for democratizing research design.

  • Highlighted the importance of care, indigenous knowledge, and AI accessibility in climate research.

  • Helped shape future directions for the newly founded Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria (IT:U).