Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect
This book discusses the generation of new knowledge at the intersection of disciplines.
Here’s some (or all?) of it on a pdf: MediciEffect
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I can’t find the edges!
a few thoughts on what is interdisciplinary
In 2011 the boundaries that were once drawn between disciplines are dissolving and deteriorating. This past static perspective is getting turned on it’s head as we face new modes of communication, immigration, and environmental challenges… Within all this change new problems arise. Designers are well positioned as creative problem solvers to face these challenges but they cannot do it alone, collaborative teams of diverse thinkers are often brought together. The borders of the design field have become so far reaching, at what point do you call a project interdisciplinary? What is within and what is outside the borders of graphic design?
>>other areas where borders are dissolving
gender
country borders as people migrate
Architecture and Engineering
“Students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have learned to speak each other’s language in a generative effort to create a truly innovative home that furthers the discourse of green-tech housing.”
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20110928/an-opportunity-for-innovation
Change by Design book by Tim Brown
Book that we should look at written by the CEO of IDEO, fusing business with design thinking.
“Design thinking is not just applicable to so-called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It’s an approach that has been used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to increase the quality of patient care by re-examining the ways that their nurses manage shift change or Kraft to rethink supply chain management. This book is for creative business leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.”
Julie Thompson Klein
Julie Thompson Klein has written several books about interdisciplinarity. We should look into them.
Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought
Another book by a Stanford professor that we should look at for institutional change, Here’s some of it on Google Books.
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Strober, Myra, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
“The difficult task of faculty and administrators is to retain the benefits of disciplinary specialization while at the same time fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.” (2)
Recognizing funding as a big obstacle, she focuses on other issues: “disciplinary habits of mind, disciplinary cultures and interpersonal dynamics. It is also about what faculty and administrators can do to overcome these barriers to create productive interdisciplinary conversations.” (2)
“…it turns out that talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.” (4)
“To be interdisciplinary one must first be proficient in a discipline” (12)
For a brief history of disciplines, see page 13. Some of the earliest universities were in Italy, France and England, 11th and 12th Century. To be a discipline, a body of knowledge must have identity (departments across universities) and exchange (a market for new doctorates.) (15). What makes graphic design a discipline? Let’s look into that.
Interdisciplinarity is “a form of inquiry that integrates knowledge and modes of thinking from two or more disciplines…to produce a cognitive or practical advancement (eg. explain a phenomenon, create a product, answer a question, etc). By Veronica Boix Mansilla (15)