Interdisciplinarity is a pretty neat concept that I was exposed to during an undergraduate research project in college. Specifically, assignments that surrounded the idea of “interdisciplinarity in a world of boxes”. While the idea did not have huge impact on my work at the time, I found myself returning to it as a solution that always seemed to “just work” for projects later on – introducing a new, valuable set of additional solutions every time. Interdisciplinarity weaves in local politics when you would otherwise only be focused on constructing a new highway next to a small town, it weaves in hurtful stereotypes when you would otherwise only be focused on building a new social media app, and it considers all parties viewpoints while signing an engineering contract, not after the fact.

Business and engineering become increasingly intertwined as problems become more complex; however, an interdisciplinary framework may help address the problems they cause for each other. For example, companies weigh the impact on stakeholder requirements prior to taking on new contracts or work agreements. But how can we do even better? Who else can we include and what information can they provide? We can explicitly explore a contract through the lens of the contractor engineering the work, the customer who needs some good or service, and the middlemen coordinating the logistics. Here, we see the impact of an engineering project through 1. the technical blueprint itself, 2. the social impact of the project for the customer (since someone perceives some quality of life improvement or perceives some need being met as a result of this work), and 3. the HR workers coordinating the employee’s salaries, the Project Manager directing work to engineers, and the business transaction itself.

While interdisciplinarity sounds overwhelming, it is necessary. From a quick Google search, we can find many disasters where engineering management did not listen to engineers, creating isolated expertise that led to disaster. Some notable examples include: The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986), The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), and from incomplete economic models, the 2008 financial crisis.

Interdisciplinarity, like anything else, is not a solution to everything. This simply calls out the value added when complex problems are viewed from multiple lenses. It also creates space for valuable thought experiments when you’re experiencing writers block or a lack of creativity, essentially introducing new worlds of “what ifs” in a structured, calculated approach.