Ever since my undergraduate days, I've been pursuing an intellectual holy grail: interdisciplinary problem solving. As a graduate student, I studied phenomenological psychology at Duquesne University because the program approached human experience from a "human science" perspective: unwilling to reduce human life to quantitative terms, we pursed rich descptions of life-as-lived. Psychology grad students took philosophy courses and vice versa to try to broaden the perspectives of both. But, a whole world of scientists and practitioners (most especially, engineers) worked across a great divide.
After getting out into the work world, however, I quickly saw that the functional division of labor in corporations picked up where academic divisions left off. Organizational practitioners have struggled against these barriers by trying to build "cross-functional teams" over the past twenty plus years. Much of that work failed because of the deeply ingrained territoriality that characterizes our approaches to problem solving since childhood. We all bemoan the impact of "silos" almost daily.
But now there are exciting new developments that are putting the design discipline squarely at the center of solving this problem. For the past fifteen years I've worked with designers and experienced first-hand their openness to problem-solving ideas. But that openness was more idiosyncratic than dispilinary; more a function of the individuals than of design itself.
Excitingly, those interdisciplinary tendencies are now being built into the very fabric of design education. Bruce Nussbaum reports on this development in a BusinessWeek Online piece reporting SAP founder Hasso Plattner's $35 million doation to the Stanford Institude of Design. The school will utilize an integrated approach:
The new design school will teach innovation by bringing together students from business, engineering, medicine, psychology, anthropology, and design to form collaborative teams that solve problems.
It's very exciting for an old war horse like myself to finally see a discipline with the wisdom to step forward an attempt to transcend the artificial divisions that have characterized our studies for centuries.
And it's especially exciting to have my adopted field of design be that discipline.
Tom, thanks for sharing some of your passion and aspirations in this particular posting and on your blog generally. But what of those with no holy grail or fellowship of the ring - each day must be tough to endure.
Have you see the Paul Graham article: What Business Can Learn from Open Source? http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
You might like it - though I suspect you may well have already seen it.
Posted by: Michael Wagner | October 05, 2005 at 10:34 PM
Great point, Michael. Not having a passion that keeps you deeply connected with your work makes the days a string of events, not a journey. Sounds corny, but hey, there it is.
Yes, I had seen the excellent Graham piece before, but never hesitate to bring anything to our attention here at TrueTalk!
Thanks for the comment.
Posted by: Tom | October 06, 2005 at 01:31 PM