Creative Facilitation Testimonial – Linköping University

In this written interview, Ericka and Kristin tell us about their experience of the Creative Facilitation Unit at Durham University.

How have you used creative facilitation in the Biomedicine, Clinical Knowledge, and the Humanities in Collaboration: A Novel Epistemology for Radically Interdisciplinary Health Research and Policy-Work on Post-Covid-19 Syndrome project?

Mary Robson and the Creative Facilitation Unit helped plan and organise two workshops within this project. 

Working with Mary Robson and learning about Creative Facilitation has been great. The researchers in our project team have very different backgrounds, from different medical humanities strands such as philosophy of medicine, medical ethics, science and technology studies and medicine, medical sociology, intersectional perspectives within medical humanities to that of biomedicine and clinical practices such as rehabilitation medicine, neuroradiology and neurobiology. 

 In some of the early project meetings, we used exercises that we learnt from the Creative Facilitation Unit to enable conversations about interdisciplinarity across different epistemic fields, such as the ‘Island exercise’ where everyone drew a map of their own research perspective(s) and practice(s). Participants were invited to mark what they saw as the ‘heights’ or the ‘treacherous’ parts of the island, whether there were bridges or ways of connecting to other islands and so on. These kinds of hands-on creative exercises enabled conversations about what we saw as exciting and difficult, at a time when we just had embarked on the project.  

 Recently, Mary also led a whole day workshop on the theme of ‘Travelling through the unknown’, which included an exercise of creating a ‘StarLog’ of our travels so far, focusing on, for example, what we, as individuals and a collective, brought with us, what new vistas or theoretical perspectives we came across, what we bonded over, what gravity pulled or made float, and what were the challenges. 

What were the benefits of using creative facilitation?

Working closely together in interdisciplinary projects such as ours is both exciting and challenging, and creative facilitation has been an excellent way of enabling conversations, in a fun, creative, and generous atmosphere – where we have used colours, objects, drawings in ways that we seldom do as part of our more common research practices. It has opened up conversations and generated new insights, provided energy and created a space for thinking in smaller or larger groups, about our processes of working together.

Were there any challenges? How did you resolve them? 

Back in October 2024, Mary facilitated a workshop to explore how best to take forward interdisciplinary work in the project both across and within its different research strands. Initially, some of us were less familiar with the creative methods she used. After all, being asked to bring an object/artefact that helped articulate one’s perspective on post–Covid/long–Covid (as but one example), can be quite daunting. But we all embarked on this task, and it has been really productive for our joint conversations.

What role, if any, do you see for creative facilitation in your future work?

One take home message, for us, is that this kind of creative facilitation is really helpful to get us all talking and thinking together, in quite different ways than our usual methods of analysis and writing academic papers or book chapters. For future work, and future projects, it would be great to include creative facilitation – and particularly so in projects where people come from very different disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary fields.

Do you have any other thoughts about creative facilitation that you would like to share with us?

Our experiences have shown us the value of creative facilitation in interdisciplinary research settings. Mary has also generously shared methods and tips with us one-to-one, letting us use her skills and knowledge in our work even when she is not able to be present with us. As a result, we have been inspired to use creative facilitation and other experimental methods in our classroom teaching and in research and outreach workshops.