By Adriana Clemente, Juan Pablo Scaglia, Verónica Gallardo
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales (FSOC) and Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo (FADU) Universidad de Buenos Aires
The constant increase of complexity in the production of knowledge and academic and professional practices is becoming increasingly common in interdisciplinary approaches. This complexity arises inevitably, when addressing reality as a web of complex relationships as study and solutions search to the great problems of society, as overcoming an hiperdisciplinary approach establishing a complementarity approach and as scientific and extra-scientific (art, religion, daily life, experience) knowledge dialogue. (Morin, 2003) But this approach is not without problems. It is increasingly the subject of epistemic reflection and few are the interdisciplinary teams satisfied with their own experience. In general, consensus about the need to build an homogeneous interdisciplinary methodology appears evident.
This paper proposes to take the team’s experience FADU/CCSS of UBA in Design & Social Development (PDyDS) as a case study in search of notes and reflections that may be generalizable to other similar teams and trying to build some possible categories for its contrast. This team in particular is self summond around what we call a strategic convergence in Roberto Doberti’s terms in what he calls “being and acting” (appropriation system). That is, this team is not defined by a specific mission or a Platonic theorizing but by an interventional desire.
The interventional desire of any project defines the construction of the objective of intervention refers to a projection of result but also to a common and flexible team work departing from the proposed DyDS Program objectives related to the phenomena of exclusion and marginalization generated by the city in its economic and social settings, as part of its own growth logic. The interventional will is defined in the project layer, intended to transform, in the city analysis and its development devices; is based in a practical rationality and recognizes two objectives: a) Influence or participate in public policy development; and b) Modify academic and disciplinary structures binded to these themes.
In a first approach to the interdisciplinary question observations are made at three levels, which in our experience, make possible an interdisciplinary working pose:
1. The ideological convergence: Convergence combines traditional and innovative lines under the same transformation paradigm.
2. The complementarity of skills: Acquired both in the curricular formation and in the professional training, allows interdisciplinary work, based on the detection of strengths to draw perhaps a transdisciplinary experience.
3. Disciplinary specificity and professional reliability: Both disciplines coincide in the fact that this work’s value is anchored in the professional quality of the specific actions and propper to each discipline. This statement reinforces the idea that undergraduate education can not ignore and / or avoid the post graduation social and institutional context of insertion.
Features that interrelate generating productive processes and reflective stages both within the group as well as to all of the involved disciplines. Ideological convergence would be useless if its proposals were not sustainable and we could not speak of conditions of equality if the ideas and knowledge of public universities were not at least equivalent to those available by the most powerful sectors.
- See article in Spanish (.pdf)
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