Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor

Analysis and control of complex collaborative design systems

This paper presents a novel method for modelling the complexity of collaborative design systems based on its analysis and proposes a solution to reducing complexity and improving performance of such systems. The interaction and interfacing properties among many components of a complex design system are analysed from different viewpoints and then a complexity model for collaborative design is established accordingly. In order to simplify complexity and improve performance of collaborative design, a general solution of decomposing a whole system into sub-systems and using unified interface mechanism between them has been proposed. This proposed solution has been tested with a case study. It has been shown that the proposed solution is meaningful and practical

By hand and by computer – a video-ethnographic study of engineering students’ representational practices in a design project

In engineering education there has been a growing interest that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. However, students’ collaborative learning processes in design projects have, with a few exceptions, not been studied in earlier research. Most previous studies have been performed in artificial settings with individual students using verbal protocol analysis or through interviews.  The context of this study is a design project in the fifth semester of the PBL-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. The preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. Video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis were used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task. Complete six hours sessions of five groups were recorded using multiple video cameras (2 – 5 cameras per group). The different collaborative groups did not only produce and reach an agreement on a design proposal during the session – in their design practice they used, and produced, a wealth of tools and bodily-material resources for representational and modelling purposes. As an integral and seamless part of students’ interactional and representational work and the group’s collaborative thinking bodily resources such as “gestured drawings” and gestures, concrete materials such as 3D-foam and papers models, “low-tech” representations such as sketches and drawings by hand on paper and “high-tech” representations as CAD-drawings were used. These findings highlight the cognitive importance of tools and the use of bodily and material resources in students’ collaborative interactional work in a design setting. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a focus primarily on digital technologies, as is often the case in the recent drive towards “digital learning”, would be highly problematic

Design thinking as a framework for fostering creativity in management and information systems teaching programs

Modern businesses are recognising the power of innovation through design thinking to sustain innovation and growth in today's competitive markets. Design is now becoming a holistic process and there is emerging need for future business leaders to understand the underlying processes of design thinking in an urge to innovate. This paper introduces a framework in design thinking to encourage information systems (IS) and management students to foster their creativity and innovation capabilities, and also improve their metacognitive skills. The framework is used to develop and implement teaching methods that increasingly focus on agility and innovation. An exploration of steps of implementing this framework in teaching introductory to high level university subjects is discussed. One of the key goals of the framework was to ensure that students learn early in their studies that design thinking is not only about identifying new ideas, but how the ideas can be externalised and differentiated to get commercial acceptances. Idea management tools are introduced in some subjects to help students follow through their brainstormed ideas, building blocks management and on-going evaluations by peers. This process has helped to spawn new solutions based on what is discussed within their group. Through the use of these tools the experiential journey of learning in collaborative environment has allowed students to interact with their peers, encourage and motivate students to participate and learn better in an effective and efficient manner

Negotiating (Inter)Disciplinary Identity in Integrative Graduate Education

abstract: Identity, or peoples’ situated sense of self, can be conceptualized and operationalized in a myriad of ways, including, among others, a person’s gender, socioeconomic status, degree of expertise, nationality, and disciplinary training. This study conceptualizes identity as fluid and constructed through social interaction with others, where individuals ask themselves “Who am I?” in relation to the people around them. Such a discursive conceptualization argues that we can observe peoples’ performance of identity through the close reading and examination of their talk and text. By discursively drawing boundaries around descriptions of “Who I am,” people inherently attribute value to preferred identities and devalue undesirable, “other” selves. This study analyzes ten workshops from the Toolbox Project conducted with graduate student scientists participating in the Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. The emotional tone, mood, and atmosphere of shared humor and laughter emerged as a context through which collaborators tested the limits of different identities and questioned taken for granted assumptions about their disciplinary identities and approaches to research. Through jokes, humorous comments, sarcasm, and laughter, students engaged in three primary forms of othering: 1) unifying the entire group against people outside the group, 2) differentiating group members against each other, and 3) differentiating oneself in comparison to the rest of the group. I use action-implicative discourse analysis to reconstruct these communicative practices at three levels—problem, technical, and philosophical—and explore the implications of group laughter and humor as sites of “othering” discursive strategies in graduate students’ efforts to negotiate and differentiate identity in the context of integrative collaboration.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Communication 201