Transdisciplinary Support for Digital Adoption: Exploring Legitimacy Cards

Digital technologies have the potential to deliver significant economic, environmental, and societal benefit, however, their adoption poses a significant transdisciplinary (TD) challenge for industry. Given the multiplicity of digital solutions the question is which better meets the needs of industry, its workforce, society and sustainability. Digital adoption decisions are complex and require participatory support to be TD, as digitalisation impacts societal groups comprised of different and divergent perspectives. In this paper we use the legitimacy of technology as a solution to support TD discussions and decisions. A legitimacy lens helps divergent questioning of the acceptance of norms and values for societies, public bodies, or organisations. We outline a set of discussion cards, drafted to structure conversations around a legitimacy evaluation of digital technologies in a workplace setting. Our preliminary study uses a workshop, with 9 students from differing disciplinary backgrounds, exploring topics related to the adoption of “Chat GPT” technology. Evidence collected from this workshop is used to re-evaluate the design and the usefulness of the discussion cards in enabling TD discussions. The results show that using the legitimacy cards supports holistic discussion and guides the topics considered, but the time needed to conduct a holistic discussion was vastly underestimated. Conclusions find the language on the cards needs to be simplified and use more examples for guidance, together with allowing more time to discuss only key topics. Future work looks to incorporate learning from this workshop to redesign the cards, then re-evaluate them with industry participants.