Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research

Copenhagen.
The first main session at the COST298 conference is on interdisciplinary design, and begins with a presentation by James Stewart and Laurence Claeys. They ask how speculative research for innovation can be conducted within interdisciplinary frameworks. Problem here include that different disciplines work within very different time scales (e.g. rapid prototyping vs. long-term observation of users), that they use different mental models, and that disciplines tend to under-value one another and misuse one another's research approaches.

Creative, inventive interdisciplinary cooperation can be exciting and inspiring, but this is not enough; it must also be principled and structured. Designers, for example, take an interventionist approach (which James describes as the 'dynamite' method - blow things up and see what happens), whereas social scientists take a longer-term, planned, observational approach. This leads them to very different conceptions of the user, for example - the user is positioned variously as inspirator, informer, co-creator, tester, or adopter, for example. How can such different approaches be woven together?

User research is a good way to bring together interdisciplinary teams, in fact. Everyone in the team can engage with the users; doing such research opens up the world of people; researchers learn by evaluating the research together; speculative reseach makes things happen well beyond theoretical perspectives only; social scientists can contribute their knowledge as they work on synthesising results; and participants can teach each other one another's methods by doing, and thereby perhaps generate new methods.

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