Thinking tools for moving across boundaries

Abstract

An interdisciplinary team (from Design, Community Development, Computer Science, and Rhetoric & Writing) created an interactive, updateable timeline showing the Evolution of Participatory Practices (EPP) in five disciplines over 50 years; the team members also documented and reflected on their own participatory practices. This Experience Report describes how the EPP timeline was created and what the team learned about interdisciplinary work in the process. It offers insights that may help other interdisciplinary groups overcome communication differences ranging from the simple (different vocabularies), to the complex (different definitions of shared terms), to the nearly invisible (the powerful, tacit epistemological assumptions underlying each discipline) by conceptualizing the work process in terms of an interdisciplinary rationality island and seeing the timeline as a boundary object. It also describes how making the process itself an object of study ensured that the reflective work necessary to effective teamwork got done.