About
Developed by intelligent systems researchers at Deakin University, the methodology behind the STICKE software is based in science.
More than a decade in development and testing in real-life environments with a variety of communities, local government and health services providers has led to a simple and powerful real-time visual mapping tool that produces evidence-based and effective results.
Deakin’s Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition (GLOBE) has a long history in community-based disease prevention. The Centre’s research demonstrates that one of the best ways to help prevent disease is to empower and build capacity for communities to lead and take responsibility for their own prevention efforts.
In 2010, GLOBE’s researchers, working closely with several Victorian communities, began to explore the use of systems mapping as a way to bring communities together to describe complex social problems and identify tailored, local solutions.
They quickly realised that the existing software and processes were clunky, hard to use and required external support from expert facilitators. That made it hard for communities who wanted to be empowered to do the work themselves to get on with tackling their challenging problems.
Fortunately, Deakin is also home to experts in developing custom software and visualising and analysing complex systems. Researchers at the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI) collaborated with GLOBE researchers, and 2015 saw the first iteration of STICKE.
STICKE was tried, tested, and developed across many situations and types of problems. By 2017, the second version was used to explore and solve problems as diverse as healthy lifestyle promotion to infrastructure development.
Throughout the journey, helping communities to solve complex problems and find local solutions remained the priority. The STICKE team continued to refine and develop new functionality in the software in collaboration with the communities using it.
The latest iteration of STICKE delivers new features and functions to help facilitators engage their community, map a complex problem, highlight, present and visualise their map, and keep track of actions as they get off the ground – all through a simple software that allows teams, communities and individuals to design human-centred solutions that actually work.
Get unstuck. See solutions. Build strategies.
Get unstuck with STICKE.
Because problems are complex, but solving them doesn’t have to be complicated. STICKE is used by problem solvers in:
