Epistemic Games: Shared-Understanding Moves¶

Element · All elements
Evidence · 3 claims (2 for, 1 mixed) · 2 studies (1 qualitative, 1 design), q2 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Five recurring interaction moves that interdisciplinary teams use, often supported by a shared visual representation (a whiteboard, a sketch), to build a single, integrated problem statement out of individually held knowledge and perspectives:

Knowledge sharing: making one member's knowledge (conceptual, procedural, contextual, experiential) explicit to the rest of the team, usually paired with an external representation.
Perspective-taking: constructing what a different person or stakeholder (a customer, a future user, a policymaker) would experience, think, or need — flexibly projected across imagined past, present, or future.
Simulation: creating and walking through a hypothetical scenario to surface cause-and-effect relationships, grounding an abstract issue in a concrete, relatable situation.
Knowledge validation: negotiating what counts as trustworthy or "good enough" evidence — the move most likely to expose disciplinary differences in evidentiary standards (e.g., trusting industry reports vs. direct empirical observation vs. one's own replicated test).
Negotiation: integrating individually proposed formulations into one consensual statement, typically through iterative, visibly-revised writing (voting, synthesizing, refining).

These moves are not sequential steps; a team can enter, exit, and re-enter any of them multiple times, and a team can transfer out to a different activity (individual research, consulting an outside expert) and back.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

At least two team members actively engaged, with the team open to revising its current understanding of the problem
A shared visual/material representation the team can jointly attend to and modify (a whiteboard, sticky notes, a shared document)

Constraints¶

Knowledge-validation disagreements often trace back to disciplinary background and can generate real, unresolved tension if left implicit — teams benefit from explicitly naming what counts as evidence for each discipline represented, rather than assuming everyone means the same thing by "good evidence"

Target Learners¶

Interdisciplinary teams working toward a single shared problem formulation, especially where members' disciplinary training gives them different default standards for what counts as valid knowledge

Target Learning Goals¶

Building an integrated, team-owned problem statement rather than defaulting to one member's framing or leaving disciplinary disagreements unspoken

Affordances¶

Claims¶

(none yet linked)

Examples¶

A three-student interdisciplinary team (UX design, business, IT) building a fintech-trust problem statement moved through all five moves across a multi-week project, converging on: "How can consumers trust and give consent to third parties to use their data" — a statement visibly reflecting each member's disciplinary lens (data privacy/IT, trust-and-consent/business, transparency/design).

Key Sources¶

Arthars, N., Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2024). Constructing shared understanding of complex interdisciplinary problems: Epistemic games in interdisciplinary teamwork. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 33(2), 405-442. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2024.2341390

Page metadata

Field	Value
`type`	`element`
`id`	`epistemic-games-shared-understanding-moves`
`title`	`Epistemic Games: Shared-Understanding Moves`
`description`	`Five recurring, teachable interaction moves — knowledge sharing, perspective-taking, simulation, knowledge validation, and negotiation — that interdisciplinary teams use to construct a shared problem understanding.`
`status`	`review`
`canonical`	`True`
`generated`	by `claude/unspecified` on `2026-08-29`
`trust`	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
`sources`	1 — `arthars-et-al-2024`

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