Comment #1: Paola Garza
Comment #2: Patrick Frith
Reference Information
Title: Interaction Design in the University: Designing Disciplinary Interactions
Authors: Gale More, Danielle Lottridge
Conference: CHI 2010 - Atlanta, GA, USA
Summary
Interaction design is a field that is rooted in both HCI and design communities which came about in the late 1990s. This paper asks whether "interdisciplinarity" agenda could be used in the university, since most departments boundaries are seen as being 'virtually synonymous in how a department is regulated and evaluated. Three types of knowledge production are identified as Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity describes activity where two or more disciplines are engaged to create one product, where it is a synthesis of ideas and methods. Multidisciplinarity is defined as research that involves more than a single discipline in which each discipline make a separate contribution. The third type of crossing is transdisciplinarity, which is the primary focus is not on the disciplines but that they are working together in a context of a specific problem or application. It is this one that is most challenging to academic norms in which knowledge is produced in the university, due to how a university functions traditionally departmental, as a way of accountability, yet this method is said to have the most potential for innovation. This could be seen in examples of papers written across departments and in a panel at INTERACT which focused on a scenario of developing of an in-vehicle emotion sensing system to deal with the problem of car accidents caused by aggressive driving or 'road rage'.
Discussion
The concept of working together across departments is something that isn't new to me or my work in HRI. I think that's it's very common that we often come together to contribute and solve a problem, in a sense that one are of discipline alone is going to solve a particular issue. While this might be seen as against traditional work, I think we've already begun to function as a transdiciplinarity of knowledge production in various areas of research with a goal to overcome the obstacles within a various fields.
Obviously, if this kind of work becomes more common, it won't seem as foreign to people. And I think it will inevitably become more common and natural to dip into other disciplines of thought as we come up with more complex problems to solve. When your discipline seems stumped, where else to look than in a different field for a different perspective?
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