ITD Toolkits Inventory

This work is in progress.

The toolkits featured in the toolkit inventory are collections of methods, procedures, concepts, heuristics, and/or other resources that can be used in designing and implementing interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary (ITD) processes in research, practice, or education.

This inventory is one product of the Inventory Project, an ongoing effort of the ITD Alliance Toolkits & Methods Working Group. The inventory provides an overview of toolkits for collaborative modes of research, debates how to adequately characterise toolkits and tools, and explores what we can learn from such a characterisation.

In 2019 when we began to think about creating some form of inventory of ITD toolkits, we encountered a tension between providing a service to the community before our information become obsolete vs. providing a high-quality product that gives credit to all toolkits out there and their unique approaches. In the end we took a pragmatic approach and did the following three activities:

1. Sample Dashboards: We developed a dashboard template that would quickly present relevant information on a toolkit. We prototyped this template with 5 toolkits familiar to our Working Group. The dashboards, below, help viewers understand the rationale and the unique value of each toolkit (in comparison to the others).
2. Overview Visualisation: We developed a visualisation, below, to help users compare a range of toolkits. We did this by tagging 27 toolkits against a range of criteria and then creating an image to display the landscape of toolkits. The tagging was guided by the question “what can be found in the toolkit?” and may support your decision on which toolkit(s) you want to further explore.
3. Community Picks: To give credit to all the other toolkits we could not cover, or to present toolkits more adequately than it is possible in a diagram, we are expanding our inventory with a “community picks” section, below.