The paper to be presented in this research seminar is titled: Digitalization, complex objects and learning in networks.
This paper investigates learning challenges by focusing on complex objects that emerge and are co-created in a digital printing network. Digitalization transforms the object of digital printing activities: they become more complex, open-ended, difficult to define, and exist in a variety of instantiations. The research follows a small network of digital printing, constituted by representatives from design, printing industry, vocational education, research, and customer-consumers. The network collaboratively planned and implemented a novel digital product and service concepts. The methodology of the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) allows studying the network’s activity as the process of learning through object construction. The empirical analysis focuses on the data from a network-learning workshop. The results of a thematic analysis of the workshop discussion show that the complexity of the digitalized object appears in the multiple instantiations represented differently for different stakeholders – figurative, digital, material-haptic etc.. Next, we carried out a conceptual analysis of the instantiations and features, and presented our interpretation of the levels of learning in the emerging digital printing network that collaborates to create and expand with digital service. We argue that revealing the complexity of the object and identifying the object-oriented levels of learning are necessary steps in way to understand, master, and enhance learning and innovation in the networks of digital age.
For more information on the DigiPrintNetwork Project: http://www.theseus.fi/handle/10024/130392 (in Finnish).
Everyone is warmly welcome!
Hanna Toiviainen & Liubov Vetoshkina