MTF Labs AB – Open Minds
About the organisation
MTF Labs AB is a Swedish company that runs intensive innovation labs combining conference talks with hands-on collaborative work. It operates across academia, industry, science and the arts, with a global community of around 9,000 innovators and 26 international events held to date. Open Minds is a STEAM education platform spinning out of MTF Labs as its own commercial entity, emerging from an Erasmus+ project. The platform combines modular hardware (microboards and sensor hats) developed in-house with a structured learning journey: affordance, discovery, ideation, investigation, skill acquisition, and sharing. The pedagogy starts with “why” before “how”: young people understand the societal problems they wish to address before they design any technical solution. The platform targets schools and teachers as buyers and teenagers as end users, with an ambition that is international, not Sweden-specific.
What challenges can the GRAPHIA project help solve?
A central pedagogical challenge for Open Minds is that they ask young people to design for grand societal challenges (accessibility, climate, inclusion, demographic change), but they cannot expect a fourteen-year-old to read a thirty-page sociology paper.
The body of social sciences and humanities research that should ground their hypotheses is, in practice, invisible to them. Search engines and general-purpose large language models return either superficial summaries or unattributed plausible-sounding claims.
Neither builds research literacy, neither lets a teacher trust what their students are working with, and neither produces a citable trail back to scholarship. GRAPHIA’s federated SSH knowledge graph offers a different surface: structured, traceable, semantically interoperable knowledge sourced from genuine research output, with provenance baked into every triple. If we can surface evidence at the granularity of a teenager’s working hypothesis, we close the gap between curiosity and the corpus, give teachers something they can defend, and treat young learners as serious investigators rather than consumers of pre-digested content.
What is the proposed use case?
The Open Minds methodology is structured around card draws that randomise an ideation prompt: a person card, a condition card, and an environment card. Students respond to the draw with a hypothesis (not a problem statement and not a solution). For example: “adults with progressive hearing loss withdraw from noisy hospitality venues, and introversion accelerates that withdrawal.” They then need to test their hypothesis against existing research before they begin building. The proposed use case is a pilot integration in which a student-formulated hypothesis is sent to GRAPHIA as a structured query, and the response is a legible synthesis of what the SSH corpus actually says: which questions have been studied, what was found, where the evidence agrees or disagrees across cultural contexts, and where there are gaps. The integration would be assessed on whether SSH research can be made genuinely useful to teenage investigators, and whether the student artefacts generated (hypotheses, queries, reflections) can be returned to the graph as new SSH data points.
What type of SSH data or content are involved?
Open Minds is not a data provider or a publisher. They are a content consumer in the classic sense: they ask GRAPHIA to surface evidence on the human side of design problems. The SSH content they expect to draw on includes empirical sociology and cultural studies on lived experience (disability, ageing, migration, urban life), social psychology on behaviour and attitudes, ethics and applied philosophy, design research, anthropology, and policy-adjacent humanities.
Students’ questions move across these sub-domains in a single investigation: “what is it like to be X in environment Y, what design interventions exist, and what cultural context would change that picture?”
Open Minds are interested in evidence-grade synthesis rather than full-text papers, but they expect to maintain a trail back to the underlying sources so that older students and teachers can verify a claim if they choose. They would also be interested in returning structured artefacts to the graph: anonymised hypotheses, design responses, and teacher annotations, treated as a new SSH micro-corpus.
What technical aspect would be used?
On the technical side, the central capability Open Minds need from GRAPHIA is a conversational interface to the corpus: a retrieval-augmented pipeline pinned to the federated SSH knowledge graph rather than a generic LLM. They need it tuned for two distinct audiences: teenage learners (concise plain-language summaries, age-appropriate citations) and teachers (richer evidence synthesis, source links, confidence indicators). They also need the graph and any AI services around it to make absences visible: when a hypothesis has no underlying evidence, the system should say so rather than confabulate. Compliance with GDPR and the EU AI Act is non-negotiable for their domain, where end users are minors. On the upgrade side, they would package GRAPHIA’s competency-question methodology for their students as their own research craft, embedding the pattern of input, path, output as a teachable element of investigation. Longer term, GRAPHIA’s embedding services and entity-extraction modules are candidates for processing student-generated artefacts back into the graph.
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