Tom Maiorana
Interdisciplinary collaboration is critical to addressing the extraordinary challenges that are of concern to the systemic design community. Given the importance of such collaboration, especially for ill-defined and unbounded problems, there is surprisingly little training or support to guide designers, academics, and practitioners in framing interdisciplinary collaboration. This lack of scaffolding means that collaborations more often resemble a contractual exchange than shared intellectual work. This paper presents and explores several illustrative examples and articulates two distinct modes of interdisciplinary collaboration: relational interdisciplinary collaboration and transactional interdisciplinary collaboration. A mode can be defined as a way of thinking, doing, communicating, and managing a collaboration. Analysis of these modes is approached through six attributes: the collaborative foundation, power relationships, language and means of expression, approaches to risk, products of the collaboration, and the potential for transformative outcomes. These attributes help distinguish between the two modes and serve to guide organisations in ways to construct and support more effective cultures of collaboration.
KEYWORDS: interdisciplinary collaboration, complex systems, interdisciplinarity, transformative research
RSD TOPIC(S): Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology