Creativity, Design, and Transdisciplinarity

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship of creativity, design, and transdisciplinarity, with emphasis on collaborative research. It sorts through definitions of the core terms in order to identify their intersections across discourses of transdisciplinarity. Outcomes differ from extending an existing approach to redirecting or reformulating it. Contexts likewise differ from product innovation to environmental problem solving. However, shared characteristics of novelty, boundary crossing, and generativity appear widely as well as synthesis, critique, and reflexivity. In the first of three examples—architecture and urban planning—transdisciplinary approaches are generating new hybrid modes of inquiry and action that are bridging gaps between critical theory and projective design and between practice and social, political, and normative concerns. Designerly ways of thinking are also leveraging creative dimensions of practice, fostering relational knowledge while being open to subjectivity and the unexpected. The second example—environmental sustainability—highlights heuristic thinking in an “ecological rationality” or “pragmatism” that fits a particular problem, rather than deriving from a generic method. Transdisciplinary problem solving is reimagined as a creative art of invention, accentuating discovery and learning. The third example—integrations of physical sciences and engineering with life sciences and medicine—is fostering creative development of alternative methods and protocols. A process of divergence–convergence is spinning off new uses through “combinatorial innovation.” The chapter closes by reflecting on an overriding topic that emerges from intersections of the core concepts—situated learning—then concludes by reflecting on the phenomenon of increased boundary crossing.