Developing a collaborative tool to foster communication in sustainability research

Climate change necessitates urgent responses based on knowledge produced by teams that transcend disciplinary boundaries, and with members whose work focuses on the generation of knowledge and on the application of knowledge, with some integrating both. Almost a third of Europe’s building stock consists of heritage buildings requiring renovation that is ideally sustainable as part of an energy transition response. The European transdisciplinary CALECHE study team with use-cases in France, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland aims to support decision-making on the sustainable renovation of heritage buildings, via research that employs co-design. However, team members are from various disciplines, with different skillsets and experience, and most are not English first language speakers, therefore various interpretations of project vocabulary could detract from finding solutions. The article focuses on the innovative integration of AI tools with participatory methods to build consensus around language use and shared definitions across cultures. Study-team members were surveyed on proposed term definitions and GPT-4o derived consensual definitions based on respondent agreement and suggestions across four languages, and a multi-stage validation process by first-language team members was undertaken. The result is a co-constructed multiple-language lexicon which has practical relevance for real collaboration challenges, for study members to use as a reference in the research and to facilitate communication. Local participation in developing solutions is fundamental to addressing global challenges, and relevant lexicon terms were also provided to use-case stakeholders to facilitate understanding in the subsequent research. The methodology provides a replicable framework for similar challenges in collaborative research. (248 words)