When speaking about the move toward greater collaboration and teams of discipline experts all working in concert on projects and approaches to problem solving, the word that I’ve been using is multidisciplinary. I had an enlightening conversation with Kenneth Brooks, professor of Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University (ASU) yesterday. He filled me in on the work that’s being done at ASU on issues of sustainability and a transdisciplinary approach.
The transdisciplinary approach takes the pressing global problems and works to engage all those vested in the issues to solve these problems through constructive engagement that spans disciplinary expertise. At the root of the approach is the feeling that we’ve compartmentalized too much, and have lost sight of solutions that go beyond our individual skill sets.
Here’s a short pull from the Wikipedia entry on this topic.
“The values embedded in the transdisciplinary vision are basic: sharing, respect, and resolve. As with any ethos, it calls for a commitment not to a method or practice, but to a way of being; not to a new religion or metaphysics, but to a new way of life. The binary distinctions between the public and the private, the mental and the physical, the object and the subject, are transcended in this new vision. It is a distinctly postmodern point-of-view, calling on women and men, on “transdisciplinary-minded persons of all countries” to join in bringing this vision into reality, into “everyday life.” It is a bold vision; some might even say an impossible one, filled with a zeal for justice, equality, inclusion, and true democratic decision-making.”
From this top-level, and almost utopic vision come such institutions such as ASU’s School of Sustainability, where the degree programs are flexible and focused on problem solving — “addressing the linkages between people in their social, natural, and built environment.”
