Credit: UCL Press / Alan Wilson

Global challenges such as climate change, the future of work, and smart cities increasingly require input from a range of subject experts.

Professor Sir Alan Wilson, Director of Research at IFT, reflects on the importance of interdisciplinarity for skills and capacity building, and for research.

His book Being Interdisciplinary was published on 3 May 2022. It is now available for free Open Access download or to purchase via UCL Press here.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, how would you define interdisciplinarity, or what it means to be interdisciplinary?

Disciplines can be defined in terms of ‘systems of interest’ – in the broadest terms, the physical, the biological and the social – often subdivided into specialisms. These disciplines all have their research challenges; but most research problems demand the application of elements of more than one discipline – and hence are interdisciplinary. To be interdisciplinary means being prepared to respond to this challenge to have the depth of what might have been your first discipline, and the breadth to be able to draw on concepts more widely.

Can you provide more concrete examples?

Start with perhaps the biggest challenge of all: climate change. It involves all disciplines and perhaps surprisingly, the most important might be social science. Or take cities, my own field. Professional areas such as medicine or engineering are inherently interdisciplinary because their focus is on identifying problems and solving them whether through clinical interventions or innovative, disruptive design.

What is the value of interdisciplinarity in a university setting?

There is an old joke: industry has problems and universities have departments – usually discipline-based. Introducing the idea of interdisciplinarity adds a new kind of thinking to a discipline-based core.

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