As part of the workshop that Jilly Traganou, Lydia Matthews and I ran this past week at the New School’s Design and Social Science seminar we asked participants to identify and diagram a time of compelling interdisciplinary collaboration. We particularly asked participants to identify the material and immaterial (social, cultural…) conditions that enabled this compelling interdisciplinary moment. The results were fascinating. Planning our workshop activity beforehand, we had to think of what our own answers would be to this admittedly difficult question.
I feel lucky to have had some powerful interdisciplinary moments in my education and teaching life (not least in my collaboration with Kaushik on Buscada), but the one that sprang to mind was one that has informed (and absorbed) much of my thinking over the past few months. I recalled the blackboard shown above.
It shows a portion of my start-of-semester working process with landscape architect Elliott Maltby to develop the syllabus for our Public Space Critical Studio + Practice-based Seminar which we are co-teaching this semester, Fall 2009 at the New School. Blue post-its are my methodological and ethnographic readings, green post-its are Elliott’s design readings. Many of our readings overlapped – and sometimes we would find the same readings posted twice, on both green and blue post-its. Though we had had conversations, this process made powerfully visible our own intersecting thinking, through our intersecting literatures. This process made it clear to us that we could indeed collaborate on the class, showing us that we had often come to similar ideas via different routes.
