Know your challenges

Virtual universe helps people handle challenges in modern working life

How do you react in stressed situations at work? Does your life add up? Or maybe you have an employee who is tearing his hair out and crying himself to sleep every night – what to do?

On the platform ”Kom ind i det moderne arbejdsliv” (join modern working life) created by Assistant Professor Anders Raastrup Kristensen from Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, among others, such challenges are pushed to the extreme and tested. Employees and managers are to be the active players on a website, which houses rooms for reflection, challenge and pause, among other things.

- The user is to move around in the virtual rooms, and by playing games he experiences the challenges first-hand. He is taught how to recognise the challenges that he often encounters in his working life, the point being that he is going to get better at handling them. It is important to recognise that work-related problems are not quick-fix problems that can be solved here and now, because the challenges are a necessity in modern working life, which we gradually have to learn how to deal with, says Anders Raastrup Kristensen.

Research communication directed at feelings – not the mind

The user is to experience and feel the consequences of his decisions. The digital platform is to communicate research in a new way where the user is an active part of the learning process instead of just the reader of a text. That way, the user will also understand the problem differently the second time around because the user will then associate the experience with a particular feeling.

- Research is not just communicated to the mind, we also wish to affect the user emotionally. He may share his experience with others and use them for reflection. In other words, we do not just communicate knowledge, but seek to create space for learning, says Anders Raastrup Kristensen.

The project

The Danish Research Council for the Humanities has granted the project funding of DKK 1.28 million. It is to be a collaboration between the Technical University of Denmark, the Danish School of Education (DPU), The Danish Society of Engineers (IDA), the Danish Association of Lawyers and Economists (DJØF), the Confederation of Danish Industry and Local Government Denmark. The project will be launched in April 2010, and it will be headed by Anders Raastrup Kristensen and Ditte Vilstrup Holm from Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy. Designer Birte Dalsgaard will also contribute to the project. The platform will be launched in November 2010.