Deaar Klaus,

The definition of interdisciplinarity that you propose -- "territory
between established disciplines" -- is based on a conception of
knowledge quite foreign to those who pursue interdisciplinary work.

Most of us use the term as the Oxford English Dictionary does: "Of or
pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning;
contributing to or benefiting from two or more disciplines." "Add:
Hence interdisciplinarity n., the quality, fact, or condition of
being interdisciplinary." Merriam-Webster's usage exemplars make the
same point while including artistic practices in the term
"discipline": "involving two or more academic, scientific, or
artistic disciplines."

Descriptive lexicography states means ("definitions") in terms of the
way people actually use the word in daily life and in published
exemplars. For a scholar who takes a strong stand on the power of
language as the way we construct our world, you do not seem to accept
the way that interdisciplinary scholars conceive and language the
world. It is quite different to the way that you describe it. The
concept of interdisciplinarity based on partitioned knowledge and the
spaces between partitions suggests a barren no-man's-land where
nothing happens.

The metaphor I prefer is a wetlands, a tidal zone where rich life
bubbles up and interacts between different kinds of knowledge
ecologies. Any taxonomy of fruitful disciplines is generally
temporary -- mathematics as it was in Leibniz's day is not the
mathematics of Hilbert's time nor yet mathematics as we use it today.
The fields, focal points, purposes and linkages to applied
mathematics are each different, and out understanding of the
philosophy underlying mathematics is also different -- with a much
greater recognition of roles that social construction and metaphor
play in mathematical thinking. Shaping a taxonomy of the discipline
or disciplines of mathematics would give you a different picture in
each era. That's how it is with all disciplines.

It is difficult to intervene _successfully_ "into what presently
exists and create futures that are in some arguable way better than
what exists" without drawing at different points of the information,
knowledge, and practical skills of colleagues from many fields. Few
of us know enough to design more than a simple artifact. Most
successful designers work of anything more complex than a simple
artifact work in an interdisciplinary way. This is not done by
working in empty spaces between disciplines, but by drawing on and
working with information, knowledge, and skills from "two or more
academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines."

For some kinds of projects, that might even involve learning from
homiletics. Preaching is an art that involves intervening in what
presently exists to conceive and create potentially different
futures. "Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new
heavens and a new earth..." (2 Peter 3:13)

Most everyone who learns anything new or useful does so by borrowing
concepts and methods from different fields. There are, of course,
many forms of research and application that work with OLD, useful
things. To design or work with old and useful things, we can draw on
settled knowledge, commonplace heuristics, and professional or guild
traditions. They work quite well, and we'd hardly survive if we had
to invent the entire world every day.

Once we need to know or understanding something we don't yet know,
however, we can't simply imagine it. Imagination plays a key role in
design, the teleological role. Once we envision the purpose or goal
we seek, we need some kinds of tools or ways forward. These generally
proceed through different forms of analogy and metaphor, as well as
by trying different tools. Some may be absolutely new -- but this
happens very infrequently in human evolution. It is far more common
that human beings make progress by drawing on and applying existing
repertoires of tools and ideas in news ways -- seeing what many have
looked at without seeing other uses or possibilities than those of
the past.

A vast amount of genuine innovation and design, as well as
significant invention, involves working at the ecological zone
located between and sharing the properties and attributes of two --
or more -- disciplines.

I don't know about plumbing or automobile repair, but surgeons design
surgical procedures and they often design and plan a specific
operation carefully. Some surgeons also work with other kinds of
designers to design the actual instruments they use for the
procedures they create. Preachers design the sermons they give, and
they design the worship services within which they give them. These
and other professions are design professions in the sense that
Herbert Simon defined design. So I'd have to say that SOME
professional designers do practice surgery and preaching.

Yours,

Ken



Klaus Krippendorff wrote:

--snip--

Designers use their discourse to intervene into what presently exist
and create futures that is in some arguable way better than what
exists and this must include the expectations of those who might come
to live in that future. it does not matter whether those who come to
live in that future are sociologists, psychologists, physicists or
medical professionals, who each have their own discourse and do their
own thing. the latter may well borrow from design discourse, for
example to gather data, design experiments, or invent a life saving
device. designers too need to work with engineers, economists,
environmentalists who each pursue their discursively defined and
constructed objects.

design is interdisciplinary only if you see knowledge in terms of
partitioned territories and find that design does not seem to have a
territory of its own. the emphasis on design discourse does not need
this territory (although some discourses may position themselves in
such). it is just a way of being clear as to what designers do and
what they as professional designers do not do, such as plumbing,
automobile repair, surgery, and preaching the gospel.

--snip--