The project team members were professionally aquainted- none had formal qualifications in HASS fields

Expertise in the social sciences is ominously missing from this list, which primarily concerns engineering design and technology development. This is despite the failure
of two decades of significant financial investment in essential services for remote communities to deliver functional, appropriate and socially acceptable water and
sanitation—a failure potentially due to lack of understanding the socio-cultural, economic and institutional issues associated with everyday practice, governance and capacity of local communities in the use, management and operation and regulation of alternative systems of service provision.

Interpretative traditions were suspicious of complexities- they liked the 'black and white', ignoring, suppressing, denying and overlooking everything happening in the 'grey' messy middle ground

despite holding to a black and white view, engineers’
practice was in fact hybrid as it involved troubleshooting, rules of thumb and tinkering to make practical adjustments in response to unpredicted and messy
contingencies encountered in the field

In natural ecosystems, ‘abiotic factors’ include things like climate, availability of sunlight, and nutrients that support life. Their equivalents in knowledge ecologies are the economic and policy climates and availability of resources (such as research funding and facilities).

Key driver for the AWSC was the rapid decline in federal and state funding for water and sanitation projects in rural Alaska and the costs of addressing rural water and sewer needs rising

Decentralised water and wastewater treatment, minimisation and recycling technologies were the main focus of the AWSC

International expertise was sought in a bid to draw on innovative systems of service provision from different
geographical contexts and climates, and in diverse contexts such as drought and disaster response, recreational vehicles, boats, and the aerospace industry.

and managed by the community. So although it was novel in its objectives of being inclusive of social and community knowledge, in the process of achieving its outcomes the AWSC placed criteria upon design solutions that constrained the potential for innovation. Setting preconceived criteria for the design of the systems directly contradicted the philosophy of design thinking and the goals of the proposal. In addition the overarching assumption that the final system of service provision would be a onesize-fits-all solution disregarded in advance the diversity of geographic, demographic, cultural, socio-economic, political and governance capacities across the 300? communities the final system was to service.

the analyst of knowledge ecosystems is interested
in how resources for knowledge production are distributed to, or accessed by different types of knowers, and the relative status and power of different species of
knowers and knowledges

AWSC produced conventional water and sanitation priorities

The budget allocations for social research and community engagement did not reflect the practical reality of funding researchers to visit, and get to know, remote area communities and involve them in the design process. Instead they would have funded a short survey to gather data about historical and proposed water and sanitation systems. This extractive survey approach is the opposite of more extensive fieldwork and iterative participatory processes implied by inclusion of terms like ‘design thinking’ and ‘community engagement’ in the AWSC’s brief. Such a disparity between the expected degree of engagement and the size of the social research budget

These budgetary problems could be understood as consequences of an unsuccessful effort at integration: certainly social research is conceived as part of the enterprise, but on terms defined by STEM experts rather than by social scientists

a knowledge ecology framework highlights how interactions between different knowledges and knowledge practitioners are shaped by contextual factors: the conditions of knowledge production, the research policy climate, the distribution of research funds and access to enabling infrastructures

Knowledge adaptation, bridging the boundaries. a ‘knowledge ecology’ is always in flux, with
evolutionary pressures from within and without being exerted at different scales,
sites and relationships.,

This paper has considered the case of a collaborative trans-disciplinary project that employed strategies for communicating and translating from the paradigm of
interpretive social (or socio-technical) research into terms familiar to and utilizable by engineers, but where, despite best intentions, aspirations for a participatory design process were not fulfilled.

Knowledge ecologies metaphor/model helps see people beyond their own knowledge niches

as a forensic tool, the model provides a basic framework for examining and understanding the relations between different types of knowers, knowledges and conditions of knowledge production. In the KE model, knowledge ‘‘integration’’—in the positivist sense of incorporating data into some unifying knowledge field—is not presumed to be the only or most desirable relationship option.

The AWSC could be perceived as a lost opportunity to engage in a type of knowledge production and sociotechnical development that diverged from the
standard consultant engineering approac

Prioritised innovation over collaboration in each team working with a limited number of villages and nothing was done to share social research

the knowledge ecology framework helps us think about how crossdisciplinary, and in particular, cross-paradigm collaborations involve more than the assemblage of different knowers and knowledge sets: they also involve different modes of knowledge and conditions of knowledge production, and decisions (whether deliberate or by default) about how resources of funds and time are distributed on a
project