Dr Agnessa Spanellis

FeME Deputy Director and co-lead (social acceptability)
University of Edinburgh Business School

Dr Agnessa Spanellis is a Senior Lecturer of Systems Thinking at the University of Edinburgh Business School and a director of Gamification and Systems Thinking Lab.

Agnessa’s research focuses on gamified environments to help organisations and communities understand complex systems and make better decision, and gamification as a new approach to improve and sustain organisational performance and creating systemic change. She is particularly interested in looking at how gamification underpinned by the principles of systems thinking can be used to improve social and environmental sustainability in local communities. She has worked with local communities in the UK, Colombia, Indonesia, and Brazil and has recently published a book on systems thinking. In one of the latest projects, she has developed a gamified methodology for conducting public consultations, which integrates causal mapping method from soft systems thinking, and successfully trialled it with national parks in the UK.