Creating Spaces for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Colleges, Cities and the World

I’m Cindy Leow, 19. At the heart of everything I do, I’m a social entrepreneur, designer of experiences and connectors of people and ideas. I go to Minerva Schools at KGI, a new higher education institution that has no campus and no lectures. Instead, we travel the world together to live and learn in seven global cities, learn based on the science of active learning on a seminar platform and work with civic partners and organisations to impact each city we live in.

“Where are the ‘Business Kids’?”

In San Francisco, our city is literally our campus — our cohort lives in a dorm in Midmarket, but the rest of the city is ours to explore. So visiting friends in “traditional” US universities often comes as a culture shock.

I’m visiting my friend at his college campus in downtown LA, and he’s showing me around his lush, brick-wall, red-picket-fenced campus.

We pass by a cinematic compound glittering in the sun as my friend quips, “This is the best school of film in the country.” Enthralled, we walk ahead as we discuss its famed alumnae.

“And that is the school of business.” He points at a squat building surrounded by water fountains and a near-empty lawn, “the business kids are always in there; you can see their pitch decks reflecting off the top of the building — just never them. I don’t know what they do, honestly.”

“Hah.” I’m puzzled. “Where do you ‘engineering kids’ hang out, then?”

“Well. Mostly the dorm I live in. It’s infamous for producing outstanding engineers, you know?” he grins.

As I ooh and aah over the rest of his university world — so different from the one I am used to — with its little bubbles of people and groups and interests, increasingly separated in terms of both distance and interests from each other, I come to a looming realisation.

Speaking to some of my friends’ experiences in other colleges, I realise that it’s human nature to tend to associate ourselves with people who look and think like us. And the way college campuses are structured don’t help that. In a Cengage survey (2014), 33% of students share that they met their closest friends in classes and 78% of students met their best friends in their dorms.

Is that a problem? Yes. Keeping ourselves within our bubble of friends who are reading the same things, who have the same worldview and interests is insidious to our view of the world. Without built-in ways to interact with more a wider network of people, we start to believe that our ‘way of life’ is correct over others’. Because of this lack of interaction and early specialisation, we never reach a standard where we start to collaborate between disciplines.

It’s on these kind of college campuses that this polarisation truly manifests: by separating people and communities so early on in life. Structures and cultures must be set in place to accommodate spontaneous transmission of ideas.

Why do Collaborative Spaces Matter?

The intersection of industries and disciplines is where real innovation happens, and where transformative change begins. It is the very foundation of our societies. It’s the emergent property of the Medici effect.

Diversity comes in many forms: talent, skillset, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry, education, socioeconomic status, movie preference — you name it. In complex systems theory, the higher the diversity of a team, the more successful it is at creating disruptive ideas, keeping the quality of the production higher simply because of the wide variety of ideas coming in (Johansson, 2004).

The adage used to be that “you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.” In today’s increasingly networked world, it’s now “you are the sum of the five communities you are the most active in.” The real value of a person is no longer just their skillsets on their own, but the quality of their collaborations and innovations. It’s how they are able to tap into their wide networks to open doors and create opportunities for themselves and others.

How might we Transform Spaces in Existing Universities?

First of all, we need to think about why universities are built the way they are now — i.e. separated into different disciplines and ‘types’ of students. Practically and logistically, it’s just easier — but not more effective — in large institutions, to separate the buildings into the disciplines of one’s academic study.

Stanford University understood this to be a huge problem, and built a creative hub called Clark Center “to inspire chance encounters amongst people of different disciplines.” And it’s been highly successful at creating spontaneous collaborations between biomedical engineers, medicine students and basic science students.

Building hubs like Clark Center in every college campus would be ideal. However, given constraints to building resources, we need to manifest creative ways to build collaborative spaces that are integrated within existing campuses — from ground-up.

Think little idea “pop-ups” in the middle of a campus for spontaneous mixture of energies from a wide range of academic disciplines. Think purpose-built, for-anyone coworking areas around campus. Think idea-thons, not hackathons. Think of how to make students from different disciplines need to talk to each other to pass their classes: think of repurposing projects, assignments, classes, the curriculum, to include interdisciplinary interactions.

Taking it Beyond Universities

Public spaces can also be transformed to accommodate this spontaneous collaboration. Creating hubs, public coworking spaces, open innovation laboratories and public platforms for open ideation should be part of major cities’ agenda.

Relating this to international relations and peace theory, peace isn’t just the absence of war, poverty or conflict. Positive peace is where humans prosper and flourish in happy, integrated communities. Diverse collaboration and innovation — starting in educational institutions, then beyond — will only lead to the creation of positive peace.