Thoughts on multidisciplinarity

What does it mean to be multidisciplinary? To be interdisciplinary?

This concept is rapidly gaining speed in today’s world. Some have even thrown around the term “anti-disciplinary,” such as Carnegie Mellon's Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

But what does it mean?

Let me go back to disciplinary thinking, first. It’s incredibly important that we have specialized fields. So much of what we enjoy today — “smart” products, high-speed internet, high-fidelity video games, to name a few — wouldn’t be possible without the incredible specialization of today’s tech.

But much like I’d expect the folks at CMU to explain, and like the people in my own graduate program (CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute) consider daily, creativity and playful questioning is somewhat stifled by disciplinary thinking.

There’s a correlate truth to the importance of specialization, which is that none of the pivotal advancements of today’s tech could have been made without the diverse swath of disciplines that underlie them.

It’s entirely possible that in tomorrow’s world, the specializations that make crucial advancements possible won’t be so specialized. Instead, they’ll be impossible to describe without mentioning their multidisciplinary constituent parts.

For example, how would you describe data science, the field that’s exploded before all of our eyes?

Instead of launching into a technical explanation of SQL, it seems easiest to describe it using other fields — it’s part statistics, part software.

It would be silly not to speculate, even expect this trend to continue. What’s artificial intelligence? Human-computer interaction?

These fields are inherently multi- and interdisciplinary. Perhaps in the sciences, we don’t quite arrive at anti-disciplinary — we need our old disciplines to describe our new disciplines.

But there is a bold trend happening, and it’s to recognize the strength of combining multiple avenues of thought — so to arrive at a way of thinking that is fundamentally more creative, diverse, and playful.