Madni (2018) Transdisciplinary systems engineering.
Azad Madni‘s 2018 book on Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering is a seminal contribution to scholars of transdisciplinarity as well as to initiatives that aim to promote “transdisciplinary thinking” about complex socio-technical systems. A few extracts are provided below:
Our 21st Century World (Page 1): “The twenty-first century is already a century of disruptive innovation and ever-increasing complexity that is being fueled by hyper-connectivity and convergence among technologies and disciplines, respectively. According to the 2014 National Academy of Science (NAS) report on convergence, The key message of convergence, however, is that merging ideas, approaches, and technology from widely diverse fields of knowledge at a high level of integration is one crucial strategy for solving complex problems and addressing complex intellectual questions underlying emerging disciplines.“
Thinking About Change Propagation (Page 18): “A key aspect of the new mindset is understanding how change propagates in complex systems. The intent in this case is to understand the downstream impact of a “quick fix” that might solve an immediate problem only to surface later in the form of unintended consequences elsewhere in the system and displaced in time.”
21st Century Workforce Upskilling (Page 189): “As we look to the future, we have to expand engineering concepts and adapt engineering education for a twenty-first-century engineering workforce. The new breed of engineers will need to acquire a broader skillset. In an era that is being defined by disciplinary convergence, disruptive technologies, and new media delivery platforms, engineers will need a broader set of competencies with the profile being more π-shaped, rather than T-shaped. In other words, the engineer will need depth in a couple of areas (e.g., mechanical engineering and business), with breadth of knowledge in multiple areas. At the same time, academic institutions will have to revise and redefine traditional boundaries inherent in the way today’s departments and schools are organized. As important, industry will have to reimagine required competencies based on twenty-first-century systems and ongoing advances in disciplinary convergence. They will need to make sure that engineering education is aligned with these competencies.”
Exploiting Disciplinary Convergence (Page 193): “As technological advances continue and disciplinary convergence broadens and deepens, cross-disciplinary approaches will gradually become part of mainstream engineering and engineering education. Cross-disciplinary approaches, the center piece of transdisciplinary systems engineering, will introduce new perspectives, new insights, and occasionally new concepts into mainstream engineering making complex systems engineering problems tractable. In this book, I have provided examples of how transdisciplinary thinking can help explore, formalize, and exploit the synergy between engineering and other disciplines. This synergy is taking a variety of forms: enablement (engineering enables discipline X, or vice versa), amplification (engineering enhances or contributes to discipline X, or vice versa), fusion (engineering combines with another discipline X to create a new discipline), emergence (engineering and discipline X jointly produce a new concept), and integration (engineering and discipline X collectively solve a problem that neither could solve alone). As these synergies deepen and produce demonstrable successes, they will add to engineering education content that will be taught in traditional and virtual classrooms. Occasionally, these advances will attract entrepreneurs and investors with the potential of spawning entirely new industries.”
In sum, real-world problems do not respect disciplinary boundaries, and Madni’s book on transdisciplinary systems engineering helps explore convergence opportunities between traditional systems engineering and other converging disciplines. Among Madni’s many insights is the notion that technology convergence is a key force driving trandisciplinarity for engineering.
Mariotti (2021): Forging a new alliance between economics and engineering.
Another seminal work for historians of disciplinary evolution towards transdisciplinarity is the 2021 article by Sergio Mariotti titled “Forging a new alliance between economics and engineering” which provides an especially compelling micro-analysis of universities creating courses and degrees in the economics-engineering for/and/as nexus.
Transdisciplinary-oriented change – Abstract (Page 551): “Looking at the history of the intriguing relationships between the two disciplines, in this paper three paradigms for the economics–engineering nexus are identified—economics “for/and/as” engineering—and their dimensions are discussed. This investigation enables to infer possible disciplinary scenarios in relation to the contemporary and future society. The paper calls for a new “alliance à la Prigogine” between economics and engineering driven by a transdisciplinary-oriented change in the epistemology and methods of the two disciplines and in their way of being and interacting. The mission of the alliance is to restore a unified perspective of knowledge and putting the study of complexity in the foreground.”
Discipline trajectories (Page 554): “However, while the past was written in ink, the future is written in pencil: the evolution of disciplines is by no means a deterministic process and the different possible trajectories and the social factors selecting them must be understood and discussed.”
Evolution of the Economics-Engineering Nexus (For/And/As) in Table 1 (Page 555):
“Economics for engineering: An ancillary subset of economic concepts, methods, and tools at the service of project evaluation and decision making in the engineering-technological field.
Economics and engineering: Economics and engineering meet as peers, respecting the disciplinary singularities and the different cultures, but in a context of cross-fertilization and interdisciplinarity.
Economics as engineering: Economics adopts the engineering epistemology for market design and problem solving, through commonalities of language, methodology, and research organization.”
In sum, large investments in human capital development are increasingly being aimed at transdisciplinary-oriented change at universities.
Other disciplines?
More and more disciplines have their transdisciplinary pioneers. What other disciplines acknowledge the need for transdisciplinarity and are shifting in that direction?
Mechanical Engineering: Another seminal work is by a former Stanford professor Stephen Jay Kline. His 1995 book “The Conceptual Foundations of Multidisciplinary Thinking” also emphasizes the need for a framework that shows how disciplines connect and overlap, because as the socio-technical system design loop continues to accelerate, educators have an obligation to provide students with better models of the world that are “understandable, realistic, forward-looking, and whole.”
Social Sciences, Political Science, Economics and Public Policy: Using large amounts of computing power to represent agent-based models of actors interacting and adapting their strategies is a transdisciplinary approach being advocated by W. Brian Arthur. See his 2021 article in Nature Letters on “Foundations of Complexity Economics.” The work of Richard R. Nelson is also relevant to understanding Public Policy as a transdisciplinary effort, see for example his 1997 book titled “The Moon and Ghetto.”
Service Research (Service Operations, Service Marketing, Service Systems Engineering, Service Design, etc.): Service is a naturally transdisciplinary research area for business and society. For example, see the 2008 Cambridge University Institute for Manufacturing and IBM report on “Succeeding Through Service Innovation.” In the words of Roland Rust, one of the pioneers of the service research field, “The service research field is a big tent field.” Of course, as an emerging transdiscipline that studies service systems, service science is still in the early stages relative to faster evolving transdisciplines such as data science and design science.
Where is transdisciplinarity headed? Transdisciplinarity is a type of interaction between academic disciplines. Furthermore, transdisciplinarity is a type of interaction between disciplinary communities of practice viewed as a type of service system, seeking win-win value co-creation opportunities as they compete for collaborators and strive to achieve a more complete, holistic model of the world. Service in the AI era, both automated and augmented service work by scholars, educators, and professionals, will further accelerate the trend towards transdisciplinarity. The acceleration will go into over-drive as AI models are created for separate disciplines and merge into transdisciplinary versions of GPT-3 and Megatron Turing for scholarly tasks within all academic disciplines. Investments will increase because solving complex, urgent real-world problems demands transdisciplinary thinking.
References
Madni A (2018) Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering: Exploiting Convergence in a Hyper-Connected World. Springer.
Mariotti S (2021) Forging a new alliance between economics and engineering. Journal of Industrial and Business Economics 48:551–572.