Interdisciplinary Communication
I had the opportunity to chat with Michael Joroff of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning the other day, and we had an interesting conversation about the importance of being able to bridge boundaries between disciplines. He said the world has come to the point where the most successful people are multi-lingual – that is, able to converse with people from a variety of different spheres of knowledge. Such people are ideally positioned to serve as integrators of diverse and previously separate information. These integrators can therefore synthesize advances in different fields, create innovative solutions to both long-standing and newly relevant problems, and serve as collaborative bridges between related but disconnected disciplines. This puts these individuals in a powerful position indeed.