NCCR DFAB Workshop at the Parity Talks IX

As part of this year's D-ARCH Parity Talks IX On Inconvenience: Learning to Listen at ETH Zurich, the NCCR DFAB organised a workshop in cooperation with the USYS TdLab from ETH Zurich. Under the title "Take Nothing For Granted: Communicating with Each Other Across Disciplines and Cultures", participants took part in a guided conversation.

Inter- and transdisciplinarity are notions we find ourselves constantly and increasingly writing in grant applications, reading in studio briefs and emails, and hearing in talks in lecture halls, TED and YouTube. The academic world has agreed that inter- and transdisciplinarity steers boundary- crossing collaborations towards solving the wicked problems we are facing today. We need to invite people from other disciplines - and from industry - into our design studios and research labs and involve them in our “secret” processes and ideas.

Doing this requires not only trust, readiness to collaborate and openness to critical dialogue; it also requires an awareness of the taken-for-granted – the ability to give an account of oneself. Cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, and the understanding that the people participating in these collaborations aren’t to be reduced to their disciplines. Researchers and students are human beings with various backgrounds and biographies, with diversity in age, gender, and race, and these all intersect with the disciplinary cultures creating a complex web of positions, potentials for innovative/creative links, but also of conflict. Join us for a guided conversation to learn to navigate in this web, by first of all, sticking with the trouble and taking nothing for granted.

Workshop by NCCR DFAB (Kim Helmersen Norgaard, Kaitlin McNally, Lea Keller) and USYS TdLab (Bianca Vienni-​Baptista)