What Are You?
Today Kimiko Ryokai gave a a job talk for the open faculty position at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media, a wonderful presentation of her work on the I/O Brush. During the ensuing Q&A, an older faculty member whom I didn’t recognize asked her, “What are you? An artist? A tool-builder? A child psychologist? What are you?”
It reminded me of a scene I’ve seen played out many times, wherein a curious elderly person will approach a young man or woman of indeterminate ethnic heritage (of which there are a great many here in Berkeley) and ask the same question: “Excuse me, but what are you?” Like the faculty at Berkeley who came of age in a world where this discipline lived here and that discipline lived there, they are fascinated and slightly repelled by a new generation of mongrels. They haven’t yet realized how gauche their question is, and how it signals to everyone in the room their sad failure to grasp the changes that have occurred.
May 4th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
ZING! take that alabaster academia tower.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:19 am
That was Ruzena Bajcsy. I think that was actually a fair question.
The talk (while indeed wonderful) revealed very little about her actual ideas, skills and knowledge. I believe most of the faculty questions during the Q&A were probes to see if she had seriously reflected on her results in terms of any of the areas to which she had alluded in the talk - and the outcome was essentially negative, which was too bad.
The reality is that someone who has gone straight through school to a Ph.D. almost certainly hasn’t had time to get more than a shaky grasp of one discipline. And whether it is fashionable to think so or not, it’s very hard to make research contributions without such a grasp. Much of what passes for crazy, creative innovation and insight today is re-invention and remixing of what has gone before - but the innovators and their audiences don’t know enough to know it. Connections made based on deep understanding - good. Connections made based on shallow understanding - usually evident to lots of other people, too. I’m a big fan of both interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, but there can be such as thing as too much breadth and not enough depth.
The other thing that tends to get lost in the multidisciplinary lovefest is that different disciplines and schools of thought within disciplines often have very different philosophical bases. And it’s not just that people in discipline X and discipline Y aren’t “open-minded” enough - one’s approach to knowledge (say, experiments) may deny the validity of the other (say, ethnography), and vice versa. Labels are crude, but they are a quick way to figure out what somebody believes. And if someone wants to say they don’t buy into divisive beliefs, well, that may mean that they don’t really understand the intellectual basis of the methods they are applying.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
IDEO’s “T shaped people”
Breadth of knowlege but specialization in one or two areas.
I think this issue is something more though… it’s a constant rebelion against traditional classification. An ongoing struggle. I think of it architecturally, as in information architecture. We live in an age, at least in the internet realm, of concensus built knowlege… it’s a classic tags vs. categories deleima. Call it a generational gap, call it whatever you want… but it’s not possible to skip a step in the passing of the torch. We must strive to first understand “the rules” of history, and then we can throw them out. The difference between this question and the alternative example you give is this question was aimed at a non-tabu subject matter, the subject matter at hand was the essential issue. To put it another way. Do you understand how what your doing relates to traditional areas of research? In order for new meaning to be derived the relationship between new classifications or new titles must be understood.
A tremendously interesting topic to me because I’ve constantly grappled with traditional definitions of what it is I do. Are you a designer, a producer, a developer, a theorist, an architect? Whenever I’m working on a project those lines always seem to disappear. And yet in order to work with new people on new projects at new places the titles must be made clear so they can understand how you fit into the grand puzzle which is their process.
The funny thing is there’s a LOT I don’t understand about these organizations, but I’m very happy for this unique insight. Thanks.
August 20th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Michael–it’s funny you mention IDEO’s “T-shaped people,” because Ryokai invoked that very concept in attempting to answer the question. (Not surprising, since she has spent time working for IDEO.) Fow what it’s worth, I agree with both you and the anonymous commenter above that a knowledge of what has come before is critical. I spend a great deal of time and effort trying to acquire that knowledge.
Still, it’s long past time that we moved beyond questions like “what are you?” What does answering that question achieve? How does it help clarify any of more complex issue to which you refer? A major problem I have with talk of disciplinary “depth” is that it takes for granted disciplines as objectively existing fields of inquiry united by epistemological, ontological, and methodological paradigms. But clearly this is not the case–what we call disciplines are marked by constant flux over time and constant conflict at any point in time. So having someone labeled as a “sociologist” tells me very little more than having them labeled as a “multidisciplinarist.” What really matters, as the anonymous commenter suggests, is philosophical bases and beliefs about what it means to produce knowledge. It’s true that Ryokai didn’t reveal anything about these in her talk, and that is a fair criticism. But Bajcsy’s question didn’t do anything in this regard either.
I’m particularly irked by these kinds of questions because my chosen field of “information science” seems to be mired in discussions of disciplinarity: whether information science depends to much on “reference disciplines,” or whether it should be a reference discipline itself, or whether the field should defined in some other sort of way than via a discipline (such as via a problem domain). These are interesting questions, but obsessively dwelling on them can preclude doing anything else. I’m among those who would prefer to (with apologies to Richard Rorty) change the subject.