Hexagonal Thinking

A browser-based interactive tool for hexagonal thinking — a participatory visual facilitation method that helps groups surface connections between concepts, bridge diverse ways of knowing, and build shared understanding across difference.

Live App

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Theoretical Foundation

Hexagonal thinking was originally developed by Anthony Hodgson as a systems thinking facilitation technique designed to bridge the gap between the generalist knowledge of decision makers and the specialized knowledge of domain experts. Writing in the European Journal of Operational Research, Hodgson (1992) described hexagons as flexible, movable units of meaning — "idons" — that groups could arrange and rearrange to make tacit knowledge visible and to build collective models of complex problems.

The technique has since traveled into educational and community settings, where its participatory logic translates especially well: no single arrangement is correct, adjacency carries meaning, and the process of moving tiles is the thinking. It mirrors the structure of neural networks, activating connections between ideas that linear or list-based approaches leave latent.

Hodgson, A. M. (1992). Hexagons for systems thinking. European Journal of Operational Research, 59(1), 220–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/0377-2217(92)90019-6

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Why Hexagonal Thinking for Community-Engaged Work?

Community-engaged research brings together stakeholders with radically different knowledge traditions, institutional languages, and lived experiences. Hexagonal thinking is particularly well-suited to this context because it:

• Levels the epistemic playing field — everyone works with the same tiles; no participant's knowledge is privileged by format or jargon
• Externalizes tacit knowledge — the physical act of placing and connecting concepts makes implicit assumptions visible and discussable
• Honors multiple valid arrangements — there is no single correct map, which reflects the pluralism central to community-engaged epistemologies
• Generates relationship data — adjacency patterns can be analyzed to reveal where stakeholders find connection and where they diverge
• Supports co-analysis — groups can revisit, revise, and annotate their maps across sessions, building cumulative shared understanding

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Features

• Add hexagons by clicking the canvas — label each with a concept, theme, question, or stakeholder perspective
• Color-code hexagons to represent categories, knowledge types, or participant groups
• Drag and drop to arrange tiles and surface adjacencies
• Icon suggestions — label a hexagon and get semantically matched Iconify (mdi) icons to place on the tile, turning each hexagon into an "idon" (idea + icon)
• Snap-to-grid option for more structured layouts
• Adjacency tracking to document which concepts participants connect
• Import/Export as JSON or CSV for documentation, cross-session continuity, or downstream analysis

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Getting Started

No installation required. Visit the [centrinnovations.github.io/hexagons](live app). (Icon suggestions download the embedding model on first use and cache it; the rest of the app works fully offline.)

To run locally:

git clone https://github.com/CEnTRInnovations/hexagons.git
cd hexagons
open index.html

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Use Cases

This tool has been used in community-engaged research and education contexts including:

• Stakeholder workshops — mapping relationships between community assets, challenges, and research questions
• Cross-sector convenings — bridging practitioner, community, and academic knowledge in collaborative problem framing
• Faculty development — exploring connections across community-engaged scholarship methods and frameworks
• Graduate seminars — supporting research design, ethics inquiry, and literature synthesis
• Institutional sensemaking — facilitating collective analysis of complex organizational challenges

Developed by Jeremy Price, Indiana University Indianapolis.