An "Unreal" model of collaboration.
A paper on the relationship between designers (including artists), scientists, and engineers came across my desk this morning. Having read it, I think it stimulates a few interesting thoughts worth commenting on.
The authors make a comparison between interdisciplinary collaboration an an Unreal Tournament. If you aren’t familiar with Unreal, I think it’s a multiplayer video game. Based on the content of the game, the metaphor is slightly militaristic and seems to have come in part from some conflict that transpired at a meeting of academics and practitioners at a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) conference.
Militaristic metaphors aside, some of the more interesting ideas in the paper include a model of how reality differs for different individuals and/or paradigms.
Given a reality at time t1, science in the positivistic paradigm observes and analyzes particular phenomena in this reality, makes proper abstractions, and tries to predict similar phenomena for reality at time t2. To preserve a stable reality [reality(t1) = reality(t2)], science in the positivistic paradigm has to operate under the essential assumption that model and theory are not a part of realit{ [{model, theory} ∉ {reality}].
Their main research question was whether the different paradigms of designers, engineers and scientists do indeed lead to different views on reality. Qualitatively this doesn’t seem too different from measures in social science of how closely different observers agree in their observations (e.g. Krippendorf’s alpha)
Their result was negative in the sense that no difference was observed in the views of reality across disciplines. They attribute this to high heterogeneity among the participants. Instead they base their discussion on the positive relationship they observed between education and profession (that makes sense). They conclude that engineers are the binding element between designers and scientists while the interaction between designers and scientists is small. They base this conclusion on a theoretical, visual model for which they provide no empirical evidence. The question is certainly interesting and perhaps testable, but it remains speculation. Who was actually involved in brokering a peace a the meeting? In the HCI field, who mediates and translates between the disciplines?
They go on with a recommendation that,
Perhaps an overhaul of our education systems, to include more diverse courses, is required in order to obtain increased cooperation between disciplines.
It’s not necessarily more diversity in organizational structure that’s needed; it’s just the opposite. If the problem is the lack of collaborative ability, then perhaps the educational system should become more integrated with courses shared and coordinated by diverse individuals and mental models–rather than a greater diversification of the educational system itself (of course I’m coming at this from the U.S. perspective; the authors are from the Netherlands). For an explanation of why this is so, see Scott Page’s book.
Bartneck, C., & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI Reality – An ‘Unreal Tournament’? International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 65(8), 737-743.
