cognitive complexity scale and key

THE ACT OF COLLABORATIVECREATION AND THE ART OFINTEGRATIVE CREATIVITY:ORIGINALITY,DISCIPLINARITY ANDINTERDISCIPLINARITY

Diana Rhoten, Erin O’Connor and Edward Hackett

ABSTRACT Csikszentmihalyi (1999: 314) argues that ‘creativity is a processthat can be observed only at the intersection where individuals, domains, andfields intersect’. This article discusses the relationship between creativity andinterdisciplinarity in science. It is specifically concerned with interdisciplinarycollaboration, interrogating the processes that contribute to the collaborativecreation of original ideas and the practices that enable creative integration ofdiverse domains. It draws on results from a novel real-world experiment inwhich small interdisciplinary groups of graduate students were tasked withproducing an innovative scientific research problem and an integrative researchproposal. Results show that while bisociative thinking assists in the creation oforiginal research problems, both disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary dis-position are core to the integration of creative research proposals. Extrapol-ating from the results of this experiment, the article discusses the feasibility ofpreparing students for such work and the implications for universities and otherintellectual centers.

KEYWORDS collaboration • complexity • creativity • interdisciplinarity •sociology of science

Thesis Eleven, Number 96, February 2009: 83–108SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513608099121

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The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renewits verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters intogenuine dialogic relationship with the other ideas, with the ideas of others.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

INTRODUCTION

The very act of creation in science involves the combination and recom-bination of previously unrelated ideas to form original and unconventionalassemblages (Hebb, 1958; Koestler, 1964; Simonton, 1988). While it is possiblefor novel assemblages to emerge from the permutation of ideas within a singlediscipline, it is increasingly believed that the creation of new scientific know-ledge – creativity – is enabled and accelerated by fusing ideas from multipledisciplines: ‘The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures– of two galaxies, so far as that goes – ought to produce creative chances.In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came’ (Snow, 1964: 6).

Faith in the alchemic powers of interdisciplinarity to generate creativeopportunities and thereby yield transformative discoveries has led philoso-phers, policy-makers, and pedagogues alike to argue for ‘interdisciplinary andcollaborative research [as] the norm rather than the exception’ (Bement, 2005).It is said, for example, that cross-disciplinary collaboration can ‘liberate aperson’s thinking . . . and stimulate fresh vision’ (Milgram, 1969: 103), createnew thought collectives or paradigms (Fleck, 1979; Kuhn, 1970), open newspheres of inquiry (Hackett, 2005; Rheinberger, 1997), and boldly challengeorthodoxy (Hook, 2002). Indeed, examples of interdisciplinary collaborationsare observable in the history of science, and in some cases have led to break-throughs. Consider, for example, the role of physics in the discovery of DNAand the rise of molecular biology.

However, while advocates and anecdotes endorse the transformativepotential of interdisciplinarity, few, if any, have tried to expose – let aloneempiricize – the act of collaborative creation and the art of creative integra-tion that underlie this potential. The process by which individuals identify newquestions or problems and the practices by which they assemble disparateideas into new concepts, approaches or paradigms to address them is gener-ally underspecified. It is seen as ‘a mysterious black box or kaleidoscopicstep’, even by those who believe creativity and interdisciplinarity can beunderstood well enough to be taught. Beyond arguing that scientific creativ-ity is at least partly ‘the consequence of trained skills’, Carl Leopold does littleto elaborate what these skills are, let alone how to cultivate them (Leopold,1978: 437). More recently, David Sill (2001) has proposed a theoretical modelof interdisciplinarity and creativity; yet he neither tests nor builds it. Thus,we are left with many aspirational assumptions and theoretical propositionsabout creativity and interdisciplinarity but few empirical explanations of what

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many have come to accept blithely as the intuitive leaps, happy accidents,or serendipitous events that lead to discovery.

In an effort to overcome this challenge, we attempt here to unpackthe black box of creativity and to capture observable steps toward interdis-ciplinarity. This effort is part of a larger study of the intellectual, social, andcultural workings and outcomes of the Integrative Graduate Education andResearch Training (IGERT) program. The IGERT program was established in1997 by the National Science Foundation to meet the challenges of educatingPhD scientists and engineers with interdisciplinary backgrounds to be ‘creativeagents for change’ (NSF, 2002). In this study we used surveys, interviews,site visits, and social network analysis to examine program design, institu-tional context, and research outputs. From this work we learned about IGERTstudent motivations, interactions, and aspirations. What remained unknown,however, was if and how the IGERT program impacts student approachesto cross-disciplinary collaboration and student abilities with interdisciplinaryintegration in ways distinct from more traditional graduate programs. Toaddress such questions, which reflect the IGERT program’s highest goals, wedesigned a unique social science experiment along the lines of a ‘charrette’,1

challenging a national mixed sample of IGERT-trained students and tradition-ally trained graduate students to engage in an intensive exercise focused oncollaborative and integrative research design that transcends traditional disci-plinary boundaries.

In this article, we begin by establishing our working definition of inter-disciplinarity and our conceptual approach to the study of creativity. We thenintroduce the charrette methodology we deployed to test for the influencesof IGERT training on student approaches to collaborative and integrativeresearch design. In reviewing the results from the charrette experiment, wedemonstrate the influence of bisociative thinking processes in the act ofcross-disciplinary, collaborative creation as well as the relative importanceof disciplinary skills versus an interdisciplinary disposition to the art ofcreative, interdisciplinary integration.2, 3 We conclude by considering theimplications of these results for universities and other intellectual centersseeking to cultivate creativity and interdisciplinarity in the sciences.

DEFINING INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND CONCEPTUALIZINGCREATIVITY

In recent years, interdisciplinarity has become synonymous with allthings creative about scientific research. The interdisciplinary imperative hasarisen not from a simple philosophic belief in interdisciplinarity but from thecharacter of the research problems currently under study (see, for example,Chubin et al., 1986; DeTombe, 1999; Kahn and Prager, 1994; Klein, 1990;Nissani, 1997). Some suggest that the intellectual context of 21st-centuryscience has changed in ways that not only allow but perhaps demand greater

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cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration to stimulatebreakthroughs that transcend the orderly puzzles of normal science. In manyfields, it is argued, scholars are confronted with challenges that defy theformulation of research questions and problems in a traditional disciplinaryformat. In some instances this is because the research questions are ambi-tious and encompassing, implicating several domains in the framing. In others,it is because research problems are of such increased niche specificity that,although narrow, they are interstitial, and thus demand the involvement ofmultiple subdisciplines. The assumption here is that, given the preponder-ance of intellectual research done within the separate and distinct disciplines,there is opportunity for unique and inventive knowledge to emerge acrossand between them.

Chemists, for example, can no longer find a significant research topicthat is purely chemical in nature, and are forced instead to draw upon know-ledge and skills from physics, biology, engineering, or even more distantareas (Schowen, 1998). Pressing environmental concerns, including the hydro-logic cycle, ecosystems functioning, global climate change, and sustainabledevelopment, cannot be addressed adequately without collective input fromresearchers in agriculture, biology, computer science, forestry, hydrology,mathematics, resource management, social science, and engineering (see, forexample, Lubchenco, 1998). In the life sciences, it is argued that ‘[f]utureinnovations in the biomedical sciences will arise even faster if physicists,chemists, engineers, and computer scientists can work shoulder-to-shoulderwith the biomedical scientists’ (Cech, 2005: 1392). The breadth of disciplin-ary skills and knowledge required to tackle such problems or questions oftenexceed not just the limits of intellectual discipline but also of individualcapacity, thus requiring both integration of diverse domains and increasedcollaboration between researchers of different fields.

Across the literature, the term ‘interdisciplinary’ is used to refer to acontinuum of possible meanings and activities ranging from an individual’sorientation toward knowledge acquisition to a system-wide shift in know-ledge production, with intermediate and variant notions in between. Runningthrough these diverse definitions, however, is a common thread: interdis-ciplinarity refers to the integration or synthesis of two or more disparatedisciplines, bodies of knowledge, or modes of thinking to produce a meaning,explanation, or product that is more extensive and powerful than its consti-tuent parts (Boix Mansilla and Gardner, 2003; Klein, 1996; Kocklemans, 1979;Weingart and Stehr, 2000). Furthermore, underpinning its various expressionsare four basic categories of interdisciplinary execution: cross-fertilization,team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation. These categoriesare not meant to suggest a progression in quality or complexity; they aresimply heuristics to ground analysis in a common language and anchor it inobservable actions. In this article, we are most concerned with interdiscipli-narity as a collaborative practice, whereby multiple researchers with mastery


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in their distinct fields or disciplines work collectively as a network or teamof individuals to trade and exchange tools, concepts, ideas, data, methods,or results around a common project or problem. From this perspective, weunderstand interdisciplinarity as both a process and a practice by which aset of purposeful arrangements and a sense of community are established toiterate and ultimately integrate ideas with others into an end product (Rhoten,2003; Rhoten and Pfirman, 2007).

The field of creative studies is itself an interdisciplinary venture, engagingparticipants from domains across the behavioral, learning, and social sciencesas well as the design, arts, and humanities fields. Within this broad andeclectic undertaking, a few dominant approaches to the study of creativityhave emerged. Some scholars consider creativity in terms of the abilities andcharacteristics of the person(s) engaged in activities such as inventing, design-ing, and composing (see for example, Barron and Harrington, 1981; Gardner,1993). Some approach creativity from the perspective of the product, focusingon the creation of the novel, original, significant thing (see, for example,Amabile, 1997; Besemer and O’Quin, 1993); while others view creativity interms of the process, independent of the character or quality of the resultingoutputs (see for example, Drazin et al., 1999; Ford, 1996). Still others concep-tualize creativity in terms of the spatial and temporal place: the social net-works, the cultural conditions, and the institutional bases that facilitate creativeopportunities in the moment (see, for example, Collins, 1998; Csikszentmi-halyi, 1999).

This basic ‘Ps’ typology of person, product, place, and process offers aneat if overly simplified way to categorize research approaches to creativity.As Elizabeth Watson argues, however: ‘It does not attempt to provide a modelfor understanding connections between any of these factors of analysis’(Watson, 2007: 424). More recently, a few scholars, including Simonton (1999;2004), among others, have tried to conceptualize creativity more as a phenom-enon, understanding it in terms of the interaction rather than the isolationof these different factors. Thus, like Simonton, we see creativity in scienceas necessarily being about the bringing together of diverse ideas, methods,and materials to produce novel questions, explanations or solutions, whichis inevitably influenced by the individuals and institutions involved. More-over, like Sill (2001), we are particularly interested in what this multi-factorapproach to the study of creativity as a phenomenon can tell us about thepromise of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Borrowing terms from Csikszentmihalyi (1999), Simonton (2004) arguesthat each individual scientist operates in a specific disciplinary context, whichconsists of two essential components – namely, the domain and the field.The domain is a set of symbolic rules and procedures, techniques and theories,facts and concepts. The field, by comparison, includes all the individualswho work with the ideas of the domain, deciding if and when a new ideaor product should be allowed and included. Each scientist during his or her


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training and education becomes a member of a field and acquires a sampleof ideas from those that define the larger domain. Some will possess a largesupply of disciplinary skills and knowledge – vocabularies, laws, methods,modes of inquiry, etc. – whereas others will have smaller samples. The disci-plinary skills and knowledge that each individual possesses are then subjectto the possibility of recombination, with the aim of finding original and usefulinterdisciplinary permutations or assemblages (Campbell, 1960; James, 1880).Whereas Einstein called this process the ‘combinatorial play’, Simonton callsit a model of ‘combinatorial chance’ (that is, bisociative thinking). Given thatscientists cannot easily know which ideas in the early phases of collabora-tive creation will yield successfully creative integrations, they must be willingand wanting to engage in generating different interdisciplinary combinationsand recombinations with others (that is, interdisciplinary disposition), whilerelying on internal criteria to evaluate which one will be a promising idea(that is, disciplinary skill).

Building on Simonton’s model, and drawing from Sill (2001) and Koestler(1964), we argue, then, that the key characteristics of achieving collaborativecreation and creative integration in the context of science include bisociativethinking, disciplinary skill, and interdisciplinary disposition. The question iswhether these attributes can be taught and with what approach.

TEACHING INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND CREATIVITY

Carl Leopold noted 30 years ago: ‘The world community recognizes thatprogress in the arts, in the professions, and in science and technology reliesexquisitely on the creativity of the people in these professions’ (Leopold,1978: 436). Given that much of traditional science is about extracting objec-tive information and seeking simplification for understanding, it is still gener-ally easier and more efficient to advance one’s scientific career by presenting(and re-presenting) artifacts of disciplinary work. While there are indi-viduals with ‘creative attitudes’ (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1964: 125) inthe sciences who are impelled to seek complexity and to discover alterna-tive ways of understanding, a critical challenge is how to prepare and supportsuch individuals who often find themselves drawn toward interdisciplinarity.

In the United States, federal agencies like the National Science Founda-tion and the National Institutes of Health are investing hundreds of millionsof dollars to reform graduate education and training programs in ways thatprepare students for new modes of cross-disciplinary collaboration and inter-disciplinary integration (Martin and Umberger, 2003). One of the most expan-sive and deliberate of these efforts is the Integrative Graduate EducationResearch and Training (IGERT) initiative. Implemented in 1997, the IGERTinitiative is designed specifically to meet the challenges of educating PhDscientists and engineers in multidisciplinary backgrounds with the goal beingto ‘catalyze a cultural change in graduate education for students, faculty, and


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institutions by establishing innovative new models for graduate education andtraining in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcendstraditional disciplinary boundaries’ (NSF, 2002).

The IGERT initiative espouses a distinctive model of graduate educationthat aims explicitly to develop scientists and engineers capable of workingacross disciplinary boundaries, focusing on problem-oriented research, collab-orating well in teams, and engaging broad audiences. There are approximately125 campus-based IGERT programs in the United States today, each organ-ized around an interdisciplinary research theme deemed appropriate fordoctoral-level research (for example, hybrid neural microsystems, marinebiodiversity). Within the theme, IGERT students earn their PhD in a majorfield of study, while gaining exposure to other cognate fields vis-à-vis partici-pation in various research-based education and training activities. Based onthe voluntary application and extremely competitive stipend, IGERT programsdraw highly qualified students who have self-selected into interdisciplinarytraining.

Root-Bernstein showed that it was the scientists trained in an unusualway who tended to be the most inventive (Root-Bernstein, 1991). In a similarvein, we wanted to know if students trained in the IGERT program are morecollaborative, integrative, and therefore creative than their colleagues trainedin more traditional graduate programs. In short, is the IGERT program pro-ducing ‘creative agents for change’ per its aspirations (NSF, 2002)?

Research MethodsA standard approach to understanding scientific creation or creativity

has been to examine scientific products, typically publications. As Mertonnotes, however, the ‘scientific paper or monograph presents an immaculateappearance which reproduces little or nothing of the intuitive leaps, falsestarts, mistakes, loose ends, and happy accidents that actually cluttered upthe inquiry. The public record of science therefore fails to provide many ofthe source materials needed to reconstruct the actual course of scientificdevelopments’ (Merton, 1968: 4). Moreover, the lack of methods for judginginterdisciplinary education and measuring its direct impacts on studentlearning is one of the biggest obstacles to advancing interdisciplinarity (Klein,1996; Lattuca, 2001). Most approaches tend to focus on single measures orreductionist strategies and are not well suited to capture the interaction ofcognition, skills, and disposition in cross-disciplinary collaboration and inter-disciplinary integration. Given the shortcomings of available methodologiesto address our interest in the IGERT program’s impact on the phenomenonof creativity and the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, we designed our ownnovel social science approach by marrying experimental and observationalmethods as well as sociological and psychological perspectives.

Our approach was modeled after the ‘charrette’ process, which chal-lenges students to solve a collaborative design problem within a fixed period


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of time and to then present their work to fellow students and faculty in acritiqued presentation. The principal aim of the charrette was to comparativelyobserve the collaborative processes and evaluate the integrative products ofgraduate students trained in IGERT programs versus those in more traditionaldepartmental programs. In addition, to capture the intervention effects ofgraduate school versus innate traits of students, we also compared studentsin the first two years of graduate school with students in later years ofschooling.

Like the IGERT programs themselves, we anchored the charrette in athematic area appropriate for graduate research – environmental and eco-logical sustainability. The charrette involved a nationally recruited sample of48 students – half from IGERT programs, half from traditional graduateprograms – of varied geographic, disciplinary, and institutional origin. Fromthis sample we formed eight groups of six students. As shown in Table 1,groups were homogeneously composed of IGERT or non-IGERT and Junior(years one or two) or Senior (years three and beyond) students, but wereheterogeneous in their inclusion of students from the life, physical, and socialsciences.

Students were assigned to their group and work room when they arrivedon site. In addition to computers and office supplies, each room was alsoequipped with a video camera that recorded activities at the table, threemicrophones distributed around the table to capture discussion, and a trainedobserver who kept notes. All student groups received the same collaborativeresearch design challenge on the first night, and were given 2.5 days to pro-cess the problem as well as produce a seven-page proposal and 20-minutepresentation. While the collaborative processes were documented and evalu-ated by observers, the integrative products were scored and reviewed by apanel of experts. In addition to providing written evaluations, experts ratedthe proposals according to 15 aspects, using common criteria and five-pointscales (1 = poor to 5 = excellent), which we adapted from the work of VeronicaBoix Mansilla and her colleagues (2008).4


Table 1 Schematic design of charrette

I II

IGERT Non-IGERT IGERT Non-IGERT

JUNIOR Group A Group B Group E Group F

(1st and Mariculture Lawn Group Estuary Group Salmon Group2nd year Groupstudents)

SENIOR Group C Group D Group G Group H

(3rd year + Riverine Potable Water Urbanization Nutrientstudents) Group Group Group Group

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BISOCIATIVE THINKING, DISCIPLINARY SKILLS, ANDINTERDISCIPLINARY DISPOSITION

Julie Thompson Klein writes that ‘interdisciplinarity is neither a subjectmatter nor a body of content. It is a process for achieving an interpretativesynthesis, a process that usually begins with a problem, question, topic, orissue’ (1990: 188). For the purposes of the charrette and the desire to studycross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinary integration, each of thegroups was given the same problem prompt:

Ecosystem services of various sorts (e.g. purification of air and water,mitigation of floods and droughts, detoxification and decomposition of wastes,pollination of crops and natural vegetation, partial stabilization of climate,soil fertilization, maintenance of biodiversity, and such) are vital for the livesof humans and other species as well as for the continued viability of eco-systems. However, considerable evidence is accumulating to suggest thatchanges in climate, land use, and other human activities may be altering theperformance of ecosystems and the services they deliver. Your challenge istwofold. First, pose a scientific question concerning the interaction of humanactivities and one or two specific ecosystem services. Then, propose the best‘next generation’ research plan to analyze this question in two strategicallychosen geographic sites that have comparatively different levels of humanactivity. . . . Your proposed research should be novel and original in boththe approaches it deploys and the insights it yields.

As mentioned above, data were collected both on group processesthrough trained observation and on group products via expert evaluation.We begin the discussion of the charrette results by looking at the experts’assessment of the student groups’ research proposals and presentations onthe dimensions of originality, interdisciplinarity, and disciplinarity.

Expert comments about the proposal which rated highly on all threemeasures – originality, interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity – used phrases likethe following in their review of the proposal: ‘relatively unique framework’,‘compelling problem for society’, ‘strong conceptual model’, ‘disciplinarymethods and techniques . . . are very strong’, ‘good interdisciplinary thinking’,‘well-motivated [and] carefully justified’ and ‘provocative and clear presenta-tion’. By comparison, expert comments about the proposal that rated poorlyon all three dimensions offered comments such as: ‘group was clearly enthusi-astic, broke with mainstream,’ ‘proposed study was original [but not] . . . wellposed,’ ‘not convinced that it addressed an issue of the highest scientificand/or societal urgency,’ ‘picked an overstudied system,’ ‘proposal is too rigidin its approach,’ ‘naïve expectations,’ ‘dominant role of one group member,’and ‘presenters had [difficulty] in stating the problem, in identifying the hypo-theses, and in describing the broader impact.’

Three of the top scoring proposals on ‘originality’ were Groups A andE (both Junior IGERT) and Group D (Senior non-IGERT). In keeping withDavid Bohm’s view that creativity within science is not simply about a ‘differ-ent take’ on an already existing problem or about addressing the ‘lacunae’ of


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an already-existing issue (1996: 16–17), ‘originality’ of the group proposalswas assessed on the basis of whether it innovated new ideas, approaches,and topics. Although all three of these groups identified a topic related tosome aspect of water, each took up very different concerns and approachesto the topic: Group A – the ‘Mariculture Group’ – focused on ‘human foodsupply and ecologically sustainable mariculture’, Group D – the ‘Potable WaterGroup’ – on ‘human impacts on ecosystem regulation of potable water’, andGroup E – the ‘Estuary Group’ – on ‘natural disturbances, human use andestuary resilience’. In addition, each group took what might be called acoupled natural-human systems approach to their particular water-relatedproblem. As shown below, the narratives of expert reviews reveal this coupledconceptual framework, which melds social with natural sciences and framesthe problem within a new set of relations, to be the primary factor explain-ing their mutually high ranking on originality. Moreover, in groups wherethis framework was achieved, the observers’ notes on and the videotapedsegments of the groups’ brainstorming at the stage of idea generation clearlyevidence processes indicative of bisociative thinking.

Interestingly, on the dimension of interdisciplinarity, both the EstuaryGroup and the Potable Water Group were top scoring while the MaricultureGroup was not. Experts were asked to rank proposals based on the degreeto which the stated problem and the research approach was interdisciplin-ary, integrative, and synthetic. Specifically: (1) Does the proposal draw fromdifferent disciplinary literatures relevant to the proposed study? (2) Does theproposal address a holistic topic and present an integrated framework toapproach that topic? (3) Is there a sense of balance in the overall composi-tion of the proposal with regard to how the disciplines are brought together?

Proposals that scored highly on this aggregate metric of interdiscipli-narity were generally deemed not just inclusive but integrative, and as havingsuccessfully generated an approach that actually metabolized the differentdisciplines presented in their frameworks. This differs from saying that thegroups avoided allocating topics or tasks by discipline. For example, the workpatterns of the Potable Water Group, though rated highly for interdisciplinar-ity, very concretely divided the tasks of the group between natural and socialscientists, as well as by discipline and skill within those categories. As we willshow, the key to integrative work may lie less in overt procedures thoughtto facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration than in the disciplinary pieces thatultimately comprise the whole. Thus, whereas the Estuary Group was iden-tified as having an ‘inherently integrative approach’ and the Potable WaterGroup was commended for having ‘a conceptual model of interactionsbetween land use, water quality and human perception’, the Mariculture Groupwas critiqued for being disjointed and disconnected: ‘the remediation of anecosystem service seems only tangential to the economic/mariculture aspectsemphasized in the proposal.’ As we argue below, we believe this differencein interdisciplinary scores between the Mariculture Group and the Estuary


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and Potable Water Groups is best explained by the fact that the latter two notonly employed a coupled natural-human framework but also anchored theirapproach in a complex dynamic that served as a mechanism of integration.

Again, on the dimension of disciplinarity, both the Estuary Group andthe Potable Water Group were top scoring while the Mariculture Group wasnot. Experts were asked to rank the proposals according to the degree towhich they represented disciplinary soundness in both problem and approach:(1) Is the proposal well-grounded in disciplinary works that are relevant tothe proposed study? (2) Does the proposal accurately and effectively usedisciplinary knowledge? (3) Does the proposal accurately and effectivelypropose the use of disciplinary research methods?

In the reviews of both the Estuary and Potable Water groups, expertspointed to disciplinary methods and techniques as the ‘strength’ and ‘founda-tion’ on which the proposal was built rather than constrained. In these groups,we will argue, it was the disciplinary-driven but interdisciplinary-shapedworldview of dynamic complexity that both enabled the collaborative processand led to the integrative proposal. We turn now to the observational datato reveal more about the act of creation and art of creativity that explain thesescores and comments.

The Act of Creation – Brainstorming an Original ProblemGetzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1964) suggest that the most important

part of creativity may be the framing, discovery, or envisioning of the creativequestion to be answered or problem to be solved. And, indeed, negotiatingand constructing shared understanding around a problem, question, or issueis inherently collaborative as well as creative (Miell and Littleton, 2004). Indiscussing approaches to problem-solving and applying the work of Koestler(1964), Scott and Bruce (1994) identify two primary styles: bisociative andassociative. Whereas bisociative thinking involves combining separate domainswithout rules in order to encourage new connections and innovative out-comes, associative thinking is about building upon ideas, habits, and logicsof a single domain. One style is not better than the other, and arguably inorder for creative processes like brainstorming (Osborn, 1953) to yield scien-tifically rigorous outcomes, both types of cognitive processing are required:bisociative in order to generate original ideas, and associative in order toevaluate and refine those ideas (Finke et al., 1992). That said, and as ourdata suggest, premature evaluation during the idea generation stage of thecreative thinking process can inhibit creativity (Kilgour, 2006). To demon-strate the role of bisociative and associative thinking in generating originalproblems, we contrast the Estuary Group, the Potable Water Group, and theMariculture Group with the Salmon Group (Group F, Senior IGERT).

According to the observer’s field notes, the Estuary Group approachedthe idea generation or problem identification phase of the charrette exerciseby setting out to ask a ‘big theoretical question.’ To do so, the group began


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the brainstorming process by trying to isolate, in their words, ‘a good andbroad theoretical question, which would have findings relevant for bothnatural and social sciences’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group E) rather thanby conducting an inventory of the individual talents and interests representedwithin the group. Early in the process, the group considered ‘water’ as apotential topic because of its capacity to accommodate multiple disciplines.They rather quickly rejected this concept as flawed, however, asserting thatwhile it covered a broad range of issues and disciplines, their aim should beto identify a good question rather than a topic which would take advantageof everyone’s expertise perfectly’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group E). Atthe interstices of pure abstraction and empirical comparison, the EstuaryGroup shortly thereafter hit upon the concept of ‘estuary resilience’. As anabstract but observable dynamic, resilience catalyzed a tightly coupled natural-human systems approach that integrated the ecological and economic domainareas of the group members. Only after the group had established theconceptual significance of resilience did it turn to routine operational mattersmore typical of associative thinking, such as specifying sites, methods, andmetrics.

Similar to the Estuary Group, the Mariculture Group approached theproblem identification process by brainstorming abstract theoretical concepts.However, whereas the Estuary Group began by simply seeking to imaginethe broadest question imaginable with no parameters, the Mariculture Groupfirst took stock of the skills and perspectives of the group, deliberately seekinga problem that would unite them. It was in the middle of discussing mono-culture that members of the group found themselves suddenly arguing aboutthe notion of ‘biodiversity’. While the group had been previously dividedbetween land and water topics, the catalytic theoretical concept of ‘bio-diversity’ brought these two domains together in what was again a couplednatural-human systems framework. By using biodiversity as the linking mech-anism and relinquishing traditional boundaries between land and water, groupmembers were actually able to reinterpret and reimagine what is typicallyunderstood to be a land-based problem as a water-based problem. In sodoing, the group transposed the problem of ecologically sustainable foodproduction from land to water, moving from agriculture to aquaculture, andultimately from aquaculture into mariculture to inventively coin the novelterm and frame of ‘aqualogy’ as its problem.

Like the Estuary and Mariculture Groups, the Potable Water Group wasimmediately drawn to the overarching theme of water because of its poten-tial breadth and inclusivity. Also like the Mariculture Group, this group cata-logued all of the members’ skills and backgrounds prior to brainstormingpossible research problems. In fact, the group did so in order to intention-ally limit their consideration to ‘overlapping research questions and interests’(Student Quote, Field Notes, Group D). Indeed, the Mariculture Group ulti-mately generated a novel and original problem of ‘potable water’, but doing


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so involved numerous topic reiterations and refinements. As compared tothe other high ranking groups, where the brainstorming processes followeda trajectory from bisociative to associative thinking, the Potable Water Group’sprocess is better characterized as mini-cycles of both bisociative and associ-ative thinking. After several rounds of imagining and refining concepts ofland-use and human perception, the group arrived at the theoretical conceptof ‘potable water’ based on the social science logics that some group membersdeemed salient to a ‘good’ research question. Like the two groups above,this group also framed their problem in the tightly coupled natural-humansystems approach, which we believe engendered high originality ratings forall three groups.

As a quick point of contrast, consider the Salmon Group, which wasthe lowest-scoring group in terms of originality. This group, despite beingSenior IGERT students, approached the problem identification process withspecialist lenses from the outset. That is to say, unlike the Mariculture andPotable Water Groups which first accounted for group members’ disciplinesand then brainstormed different problems that would accommodate theirintellectual diversity, the Salmon Group chose its topic – the Klamath RiverBasin – almost immediately and strictly on the bases of the idea’s capacityto serve the groups’ disciplinary ‘legitimacy’, ‘expedience’ and ‘applicability’(Field Notes, Group F). While one student tried to stimulate more discussionwith comments like ‘I’m a big picture person,’ the group’s collective stylewas much more reflective of another student’s self-characterization: ‘I tendto criticize rather than create’ (Student Quote, Field Notes, Group F). Equallyindicative of this group’s more associative approach was another student’sobservation noted that she ‘hesitates to go far outside the realm of know-ledge, as it will take more time and effort’, while still another argued for‘keeping close to home’. Not only did the group’s associative approach pre-maturely commit the group to a problem within the first working hour of thecharrette, it did so in a manner that constrained the group’s approach to alinear, site-based logic rather than enabling a dynamic, concept-driven frame.

What we see across the three most original groups is a correlationbetween a group’s use of theoretical concepts like resilience, biodiversity,and potability as stimuli to problem identification and their tendency todemonstrate greater rates of bisociative thinking in the brainstorming process.Given the assumptions about connections between interdisciplinarity andcreativity, we expected IGERT students would produce more original workthan their counterparts, particularly senior students in the later years ofgraduate study. IGERT programs are intended to instill (or reinforce) instudents the proclivity and means to work in new ways – across disciplines,outside usual academic boundaries, and with greater attention to societalneeds and benefits – and we reasoned that time in graduate school wouldenhance such traits. Contrary to these hypotheses, the two Senior IGERTswere not among the highest scoring groups in originality. In fact, they were


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the two lowest scoring groups in this metric of creativity. We attempt tounpack this unexpected finding below.

The Art of Creativity – Combining Disciplinary Skills andInterdisciplinary DispositionIn this subsection, we focus on the two proposals that scored highest

on originality as well as on interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity: the PotableWater Group (Senior non-IGERT) and the Estuary Group (Junior IGERT). Weshow that while bisociative processes were necessary steps towards gener-ating an original research problem, insofar as this type of thinking allowednew combinatorials of domains, bisociation alone is not sufficient to createan integrated product. Each individual in an interdisciplinary group typically,whether consciously or subconsciously, works from the perspective of hisor her own discipline(s). Disciplines differ in what events or data are inter-pretable, what methods they espouse, and what kinds of explanations aredeemed satisfactory. But as Journet (1993) argues, some of the problems ininterdisciplinary interaction result not just from an individual’s inculcation ina domain but also from his or her allegiance to it. Hence, we were notsurprised to find that those groups which identified a problem that was notsimply abstract but rather one that was inherently dynamic and complex weremore successful in bringing interdisciplinarity to originality.

For over 20 years scientists like the ecologist C. S. Holling and Nobelprize chemist Ilya Prigogine have contended that a science of complexity isemerging with fundamentally different features than what is often referredto as the traditional ‘scientific ideal’ (Abel, 1998). Whereas the core assump-tions underlying the scientific ideal include reductionism, linear causation,and mechanistic experimentation with the entity as units of analysis, thescience of complexity is characterized by perspectives such as holism, mutualcausation, and adaptive evolution with the relationship between factors beingthe primary unit of analysis. Complexity hinges on the critical interdepen-dencies, elevates feedback loops, and often relies on multivariate and multi-scaled models to represent the dynamics of the knowledge therein. While thescience of complexity represents an inherently interdisciplinary view of theworld (Sanders, 1998), executing this paradigmatic shift from reductionism tointegrated synergism depends on the successful representation, verification,and organization of disciplinary knowledge (Wierzbicki, 2007). As we showbelow, then, complexity science is an art that requires the pairing of disci-plinary skills with an interdisciplinary disposition.

Although the Mariculture Group ranked second in terms of originality,it scored relatively low on both interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity measures.We argue this is because although the group’s research problem congealedaround the broad theoretical concept of ‘biodiversity’ and was anchored ina natural-human systems frame – it was not constructed as a complex dynamic.Rather than employing biodiversity as a heuristic to ‘understand’ the dynamic


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interaction between natural and human factors when addressing the problemof sustainable food production, the Mariculture Group simply used theconcept to transpose the problem from one application area to another. Inthis sense, biodiversity operated as a linear catalyst but not as a complexcatalyst. Consequently, the problem was inclusive in that it allowed for theinput of multiple disciplines, but it was ultimately not integrative as it didnot actually demand grounding in and feedback between the theory, data,and perspectives of diverse domains. Thus, while enabling novelty, it didnot facilitate deep interdisciplinarity, which the experts noted: ‘The proposaladdresses a compelling problem . . . presents an original concept worthy ofconsideration. . . . My primary question is how the proposed study relates tothe problem statement’ (Expert B). And: ‘The team lays out a sound set ofresearch questions and accompanying hypothesis that are only one levelabove what one might expect from a disciplinary team . . . [It] does not riseto the level of the type of interdisciplinary thinking that can result in aproblem reformulation’ (Expert G).

By comparison, in addition to being original, the Estuary Group andPotable Water Group proposals were both also considered highly interdis-ciplinary. We argue that this is because both groups situated their problems,consciously or unconsciously, in a science of complexity. For example, unlikethe Mariculture Group, the Estuary Group came to the problem of ‘resilience’based on a goal of understanding a diverse set of interrelated factors. Thus,rather than seeing ‘resilience’ merely as an abstract concept, the groupdeployed it as a complex dynamic to metabolize the ecosystem services ofan estuary (that is, refugia, recreation, genetic diversity, aesthetics) with humanimpacts. Similarly, it was the Potable Water Group’s fundamental concernwith the relationships between land use, water quality, human health, andhuman perception that led them to the unexpected problem of ‘potablewater’. Not only did the concept of ‘potable water’ bring multiple domainsinto contact with each other in the problem statement, but the group’s visionof the problem as dynamic and its construction of a multi-level, multivariateresearch design created a sense of critical interdependence among thesedomains and yielded a model of interdisciplinary integration.

Importantly, we think, both the Estuary and the Potable Water Groupsused modeling as a tool to capture and convey the relational structures oftheir complex systems. In fact, for the Potable Water Group, the model wasthe ‘boundary object’ that integrated the group’s interactions, dialogue andlabor (Star, 1990). The model allowed the group to ‘see’ the problem andthen restructure their perspectives to combine knowledge and skills that wereotherwise previously divided along disciplinary lines. The following vignettefrom the group is illustrative in this regard:

Student A: There may be several facets of the study handled by researchers fromdifferent disciplines, but there needs to be connection and interaction betweenthe various parts and people within the study – between all the multiple layers


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. . . some experimental, some observational, some qualitative. The study doesnot have to follow only one methodology or examine one issue, but there needsto be connection between the various research questions and researchers.

Student A: Are any of you aware of the conceptual frameworks for integrationof humans into environments? [After naming several articles, sketches a modelon the flipchart ] So, using this model, we could develop testable hypothesesthat incorporate other disciplines, a number of hypotheses that speak to anumber of disciplines within one framework.

Following a discussion in which Student B proposes a multidisciplinary approachwith each discipline addressing its disciplinary component of the question,Student A continues, ‘One of the things we’re trying to do is meld the disciplineso that we’re not working separately. This is part of what the conceptualframework is meant to do. (Student Quotes, Field Notes, Group D)

Thus, despite the group’s highly disciplinary working style describedearlier, the Potable Water Group held up the idea of interdisciplinarity as anend rather than a means, and strategically approached modeling to effec-tively integrate and synthesize the interdisciplinary relations catalyzed by thedynamic of potable water. Rather than finding these styles and goals at oddswith one another, we argue that it was the very disciplinary rigor of the groupthat concretized and enabled the analysis of these interdisciplinary relations.

In the end, it was the strength of the Potable Water Group’s disciplin-ary components and its ability to envision how these domains and dynamicslinked together that won the experts’ praise:

The proposal was highly interdisciplinary, encompassing basic ecological andhydrological principles, land use and land cover change, and human socialstatus and perceptions. . . . This was one of the only groups that explicitlyconsidered how changes in ecosystem services might influence human well-being, and how that in turn would affect human behaviors and further affectchanges in ecosystem function. (Expert A)

The experts noted the same strength in the Estuary Group’s proposal,commending the group for its vision and its well-negotiated balance betweendisciplinary and interdisciplinary qualities.

Although the group had trouble connecting resilience, population growth,refugia and the value of ecosystem services, this was probably the most inter-esting proposal of all the studies proposed. It was clearly interdisciplinary, andyet rested on a reasonable disciplinary scientific foundation. (Expert C)

The group selected the relatively unique framework of resilience for their study.Such a framework offers great strength in that, if treated correctly, it is inher-ently integrative. . . . The disciplinary methods and techniques brought to bearon the question are very strong, and there was excellent balance between thesocial and ecological components of the problem. (Expert A)

To our minds, the expert rankings and accompanying commentariesabove clearly point to the influence of a group’s interdisciplinary disposition


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in terms of mobilizing a vision of complexity, as well as the importance ofa strong grounding in the relevant disciplinary knowledge and skills to modelthat vision. For a model to work, the input knowledge must be verified andthen organized into a structure on the basis of relevance to the situation orproblem in question. On the one hand, knowledge verification comes fromexpertise in disciplinary debates, methods, and theories; on the other, know-ledge organization derives both from intuition about and experience withcombinatorial operations. As Vygotsky argues, ‘it is this ability to combineelements to produce a structure, to combine the old in new ways that is thebasis of creativity’ (2004: 12). And, in Wierzbicki’s view, ‘constructing success-ful models that represent relevant knowledge is an art’ (2007: 624).

It is worth reminding the reader that the Senior IGERT groups, thosewith advanced interdisciplinary training, ranked in the bottom half (or worse)in terms of both originality and interdisciplinarity. In these groups, we foundthat overt attention to the deliberative procedures for managing interdiscip-linary collaboration did not facilitate and in fact obstructed the groups’ collab-orative processes as well as hampered their ability to produce integrativeproposals. The emphasis on the procedures of interdisciplinary collaborationwas greatest in the Senior IGERT Group B, the Lawn Group, which was thelowest-ranked group in all categories. While the group explicitly called forthe integration of proposed ideas, they did so as part of an ongoing discourseabout what constitutes an original, integrated and interdisciplinary question,and as part of an overused recourse to rules and strategies (for example,voting, turn taking) for collaboration to generate such a question, rather thanas part of charting any intellectual course for actually combining the variouspropositions of the group. In short, the group’s self-conscious concern withperforming interdisciplinary collaboration overshadowed, even occluded, itsability to demonstrate any disciplinary talents. Thus, it seems that while theLawn Group displayed the actions one might think should accompany collab-orative creation (that is, extensive discussion, visible representations), theyseemed to lack both the interdisciplinary disposition to imagine an integra-tive product and the disciplinary skills to construct one. As the observer notesrecount:

‘The group was very concerned with interdisciplinarity and making sure eachperson brought his/her strengths and expertise to the project. However, eachwas not willing to compromise his or her individual discipline’s methods, whichwasted lots of time and prevented consensus. . . . Their presentation was last,so they spent the entire time passing notes and whispering to each other duringother groups’ talks. They were strategizing what to say based on the experts’reaction and questions to the other groups. No other group did this. (FieldNotes, Group B)

As we have tried to show, executing the science of complexity, whichrepresents a fundamentally integrated worldview, depends on cultivating theart of creativity. Prerequisite talents for such an art, at least in the context


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of science, include both specific knowledge and skill sets, as well as a certaindisposition or intuition about how to assemble them – what Vygotsky calls‘combinatorial operation of the imagination’ (2004: 12). While Vygotskycontends that imagination is the basis of all creative activity and a factor ofexperience, he concedes that the integration of ideas depends on one’sability to assess the web of potential knowledge available to him/her and isa matter of expertise (Vygotsky, 1978, 2004). Thus, beyond asking what isthe right balance between disciplinary skills and an interdisciplinary dispo-sition to nurture creativity, our findings raise questions about if and howinstitutions of higher education can ‘teach’ dispositions and worldviews orintuition and imagination.

CONCLUSION

The sociological imagination . . . in considerable part consists of the capacityto shift from one perspective to another . . . It is this imagination, of course,that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician. Adequate technicianscan be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also be culti-vated . . . Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because itsessence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable –say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics . . . Thereis a playfulness of mind back [sic] of such combining as well as a truly fiercedrive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks.(Mills, 1959)

The activities reported here are a small part of a large-scale, multi-levelresearch project that attempts to understand the impacts of a new model ofinterdisciplinary graduate training on its students, faculty, and institutions. Inthis article, we specifically asked whether a deliberately structured interven-tion like the IGERT program can teach creativity and interdisciplinarity. Todo so, we outlined a conceptual model for understanding creativity and inter-disciplinarity as well as presented the results of our methodical test of thatmodel. Contrary to our expectations, students with advanced training in thenon-traditional, interdisciplinary IGERT program did not score highest on ourmetrics related to collaborative creation (originality) or creative integration(disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity). In fact, these student groups scoredamongst the lowest. While there is no immediately obvious pattern amongstthe highest scoring groups in terms of stage or type of graduate training,there are very clear and robust commonalities across these groups in termsof what the observers reported about their processes and how the expertsranked their products.

In brief summary, our findings suggest that while bisociative thinkingmay be conducive to collaborative creation, it alone is neither indicative norpredictive of creative integration. Rather, our results suggest that creativeintegration depends on the inclination to combine previously unrelated ideas


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into new assemblages as well as the capacity to evaluate the ideas both interms of their individual contributions and their relational complexities. Thus,our findings support the argument that the ability to understand complexrelations among things is the key to generating novel concepts, paradigms,and approaches in science (Simonton, 1988). In so doing, however, theyclearly demonstrate the combined importance of disciplinary skills and aninterdisciplinary disposition to achieving this level of complex understanding,or ‘cognitive complexity’.

Cognitive complexity relates to the overall sophistication of one’s inher-ent approach to thinking and problem-solving as well as her more specificcapacity to observe and evaluate phenomena from disparate vantage pointssimultaneously and symbiotically. Those with high cognitive complexity havenot only the preference for but also the competence to view and understandthe world in more complex ways than those with less cognitive complexity(Hage, 2006). Recently, Rogers Hollingsworth (2007) has introduced the ideaof ‘cognitive complexity’ to conversations about intellectual creativity andscientific discovery. He argues that: ‘Scientists having high levels of cogni-tive complexity tend to internalize multiple fields of science and have greatercapacity to observe and understand the connectivity among phenomena inmultiple fields of science. . . . And it is that capacity which greatly increasesthe potential for making a major discovery’ (Hollingsworth, 2007: 129). Criticalto Hollingsworth’s argument is his proposed correlation between a scientist’slevel of cognitive complexity and the degree to which she has cognitivelyinternalized scientific diversity. For us and others interested in promotingintellectual creativity and supporting transformative discovery, then, the inevi-table next question is how does one best learn, if at all, to internalize scien-tific diversity and exercise cognitive complexity.

As Sill (2001) tells us: ‘Many people in looking for ways to teach creativ-ity direct their focus on freedom, either as freedom to let the subconsciousact, freedom from habits of thought, or both. Unfortunately, the relationshipbetween freedom and creativity is frequently over-played with far too muchexpected from the breaking down of inhibitions along [sic]. Lack of freedomclearly inhibits creativity, but the presence of freedom cannot guarantee itbecause freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity’(Sill, 2001: 302). Based on the findings here, it is our belief that freedom mustbe coupled with discipline, with training in and transmission of concepts,methods, and standards – the technical abilities – of domains. C. Wright Millsmay be correct that imagination is what sets the scientist apart from the tech-nician. But, just as freedom is to creativity, technical ability is a necessary butnot sufficient condition for cognitive complexity and the ability to imagineunusual combinations of ideas.

Arguably, it is this very combination of discipline and freedom that theIGERT program set out to accomplish. Thus, while we applaud the IGERTgoals, we suggest that its implementation could be adjusted to better achieve


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them. The IGERT program was intended to ‘catalyze a cultural change ingraduate education’ and ‘produce creative agents for change’. However,designed as a ‘disciplinary plus’ approach, the program was conceived andexecuted in a manner that not only accommodates but reflects the insti-tutional processes of normal science and traditional theories of disciplinaryknowledge reproduction. As such, those responsible for the program havenot taken their own imaginative, let alone active, leap into a new kind ofeducational dynamic that could best metabolize domain expertise with inter-disciplinary experience. We argue an alternative approach to the current ‘dis-ciplinary plus’ model, which essentially asks students to inculcate and allythemselves to multiple domains, might instead engage students deeply inone area of disciplinary expertise while inviting them to participate in inter-mittent periods of interdisciplinary exposure.

The important role that separate domains play in the creative processsuggests the need to maintain the integrity of teaching coherent debates,methods, and theories when seeking to encourage integrative thought.However, simply transferring skills and techniques is clearly not enough ifwe genuinely seek to support creativity and interdisciplinarity. Decades ofresearch suggest that the creative process is most fruitful when periods of‘work’ are combined with periods of ‘play’ (see, for example, May, 1975;Poincaré, 1952). And more recent work contends that cognitive complexityis enhanced in those who already internalize a proclivity for scientific diver-sity by engaging in mentally intensive avocations (Hollingsworth, 2007). Oneway to achieve this balance between what might be called disciplinary voca-tion and interdisciplinary avocation is to return the charrette to its originalpurposes and to deploy it as an educational opportunity rather than anexperimental methodology. The charrette versus ‘disciplinary plus’ approachto IGERT training would enable the type of domain immersion that yieldsthe necessary technical abilities while also allowing for authentic excursionsinto scientific diversity and disagreement that would nurture independencefrom and imagination beyond strict disciplinary orthodoxies. As an experi-ence rather than an experiment, the charrette may not be able to ‘teach’dispositions and worldviews but it will better exercise the cognitive complex-ity that stems from scientific diversity and drives intellectual creativity.

The results and suggestions presented here should not be taken in anyway as a condemnation of the IGERT program but rather utilized to enhanceits role in the new field of ‘creativity support’ (Wierzbicki, 2007). What wepropose may well require a more radical transformation of higher education,one that reframes old ideas of knowledge reproduction and validation tosupport newer concepts of knowledge creation and exploration – practiceswhich may not be common to students or faculty of higher education. Thus,we submit this article as both empiricist and heuristic in nature, written inthe spirit of reporting provocative results and suggesting radical reforms.Though based on a small sample drawn by self-selection from a population


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with unusual dimensions and formed into groups using a mixture of randomassignment and quotas, our results are substantial in magnitude, consistentin direction, and robust to reasonable challenges. Hopefully, others will followup with similar studies and will subject the findings and views presentedhere to critical analysis. It is only through the iterative process of proposingnew ideas and subjecting them to rigorous testing that we may make funda-mental advances in science (Hollingsworth, 2007).

AcknowledgementThis material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science

Foundation NSF Award 0355353. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recom-mendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necess-arily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We would like to recognizethe contributions of our colleagues to the charrette and thus indirectly to this article:Christopher Bail, David Conz, Sarah Damaske, Ingrid Erickson, Lauren Rivera, DavidSchleifer, and Michelle van Noy.

Diana Rhoten is director of the Knowledge Institutions program area at theSocial Science Research Council. Rhoten’s research focuses on the social and tech-nical conditions as well as the individual and organizational implications of differentapproaches to knowledge production. Much of her recent work in this area concernsthe study of interdisciplinary and collaborative practices in science. Examples of hercurrent work can be found in Science, Nature, and Research Policy. She is also nowco-editing a book entitled Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the ResearchUniversity. Rhoten’s earlier research takes up comparative analyses of social andeducational policies in North and South America. Publications related to this work canbe found in journals such as Journal of Education Policy and Comparative EducationReview as well as books such as The New Accountability: High Schools and High-Stakes Testing. [email: [email protected]]

Erin O’Connor is a Research Associate at the Social Science Research Council,where she began a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in September 2008. In May 2008, shereceived her PhD in sociology from the New School for Social Research for her dis-sertation, ‘The Matter of Culture: An Ethnography of Embodied Knowledge in Glass-blowing’. Her publications include articles on embodied knowledge, tools, imagination,and innovation in glassblowing. She is currently writing on interdisciplinarity andcreativity among young scientists and is planning future research on perception andimagination in the arts, as well as embodied notions of well-being in health prac-tices. [email: [email protected]]

Ed Hackett studies the social organization and dynamics of scientific research,asking how patterns of interaction, leadership, interdisciplinary collaboration, andother factors influence the production of knowledge. His most recent publicationscan be found in Research Policy and Social Studies of Science. He is also co-editor


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of The New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and co-author of PeerlessScience: Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy. He has written on many other aspectsof science, technology, and society, including research misconduct, the scientific career,science and law, university-industry research relations, and environmental justice.[email: [email protected]]

Notes1. The word ‘charrette’ translates literally from French to English as cart. The term

was used by the school of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris todescribe ‘an intense final effort made by architectural students to completetheir solutions to a given architectural problem in an allotted time . . .’ (Grove,1981). The genesis of the term rests in the tradition of faculty assigning designproblems so difficult that only a few students could solve them in the timeallotted before the ‘charrette’ rolled past the drafting tables to collect thestudents’ work, completed or not. Today, it refers to an intensive creativeprocess akin to brainstorming that is used primarily by design professionals todevelop solutions to a problem within a limited timeframe. We proposed the19th century concept of the ‘charrette’ to fashion an appropriate experimentaltest-bed for interdisciplinarity and creativity.

2. In Koestler’s conception (1964), there is a clear distinction between associativeand bisociative thought. Associative thought works within the confines of asingle domain, whereas bisociative thought works at the intersection of distinctlyseparate domains. The term ‘bisociative thinking’ or ‘bisociation’ points to theindependent, autonomous character of domains that are brought into contactand recombined in the creative act (Koestler, 1964; Sill, 2001).

3. John Dewey often used the term ‘disposition’ as a synonym for habit. Likehabits, dispositions are deeply intertwined with cognition and emotion, and theyhave a primary role as basic building blocks of all our worldviews and actions(Dewey, 1922).

4. The original 15 criteria used by the experts to rate the proposals included: intel-lectual merit, broader impacts, disciplinary literature, disciplinary knowledge,disciplinary methods, depth, interdisciplinarity, integration, synthesis, breadth,comprehensiveness, proposal formulation, scientific skepticism, rigor, and orig-inality. For each criterion at every level of the five-point scale, experts weregiven a common detailed verbal description of what was meant by that rating.

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