on interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity...

Speaking of interdisciplinarity ...

I was part of the symposium around this book sponsored by the Rockefeller and the National Academies in the USA when it came out 2003.   It was mostly written from the perspective of engineering sciences, in particular information technology and computer science, and telecommunications.    To their credit, the committee was trying to be open to art and design, guided by the best examples of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary collaborations between artists and engineers over the past century.   Unfortunately their examples were dated.  (ie. they had not seen the TML ;)

It may be interesting to see how disciplines inter-percolate (an Alexander patterning transposed to the ecology of practices?)

We are far from transdisciplinarity as defined in chapter 4, but I expect that does not have to happen in order for significant work to be done.   I'm not even sure that it ought to be an institutional goal, pace Simon Penny who created the exemplary ACE program at UC Irvine.   The late ACE program from which Erik Conrad one of the Memory Project's forbears got his Masters before returning to the TML.

Attached is Chapter 4: The Influence of Art and Design on Computer Science Research and Development
from: Beyond Productivity (2003), NAS, William J. Mitchell,  Alan S. Inouye,  and Marjory S. Blumenthal,  Editors.