Coming soon

Unbox is both a game and a tool: an innovative approach to deepening how teams collaborate in research and education. Through a playful experience, using physicalised metaphors, groups explore how they work together through conversations, challenging assumptions, and opening new possibilities. Unbox helps them find the appropriate language to discuss and tell new stories about what and how they work together.

After three years of developing and testing, the research team has identified Unbox’s key strengths: sparking imagination, investigating hidden or difficult aspects of collaborations, and exploring possibilities for transformative outcomes. The approach shows promise in challenge-based education, transdisciplinary and transformative research, and design interventions. This project investigates two main uses. As a tool, Unbox helps facilitate more imaginative, collaborative, and transformative processes. As a probe, it reveals hidden constraints—organizational, institutional, or subjective—that limit what teams believe is possible.

Our research for 2026 addresses four aspects: identifying what works in new settings and what needs customisation, training Unbox facilitators and improving self-guidance, measuring specific effects on participants, and capturing insights effectively. Unlike earlier phases focused on design, this phase emphasises accessibility and knowledge sharing. The team will create a printable version for global use and document successful “design patterns”—such as using physical metaphors or storytelling to prototype collaboration scenarios—so others can apply these insights beyond the game itself. By making Unbox widely available and codifying its methodology, the project aims to unleash its potential to transform how teams approach collaborative research and learning worldwide.