Interdisciplinarity + Everyday Life

How do you find ways to utilize interdisciplinarity in your life? We can all talk to people about how interdisciplinarity applies to our education; but what about everyday life? Can the tools we learn throughout our program of study be applied to our daily lives?



I believe we can not only apply interdisciplinarity to our day by day actions, but we can also advise others to take notice and try it themselves. Consider applying interdisciplinarity to organizing your workspace. Now you may think of it as simply straightening up, but to really organize, you may include elements from some of these disciplines: architecture, organizational psychology, anthropology, and design. Four different disciplines have come together to maximize your workplace organization! Now bearing in mind we all maintain health, psychology, or criminal justice components of our interdisciplinary studies degree; how can we apply aspects of interdisciplinarity of one of these areas into our daily life?



Besides applying interdisciplinarity in academia, what other organizations utilize this tool? On a global scale, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published a research study in 2001 employing an interdisciplinary approach to field research and case studies. http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/X6996E/x6996e00.htm#Contents Also, the state of New Jersey has developed a linguistics program using interdisciplinary studies in the education arena and also the corporate workplace arena: "an interdisciplinary, systems thinking
approach—is needed to provide cohesion and foster the development of workplace readiness
skills." http://www.state.nj.us/education/frameworks/worldlanguages/chap1-4.pdf



Let's consider specific characteristics that are incorporated into an interdisciplinary lifestyle. Are there traits that are essential for the application of interdisciplinary studies? One characteristic I find necessary is curiosity. Although the desire to create something, conduct the research and find ways to apply those findings to any market is useful, it all begins with curiosity. You wouldn’t have the desire to create, the stamina to research, or the proficiency to apply the results if you weren’t curios about what was being queried. Curiosity, in moderation, is a great tool that can be used to advance your career, jumpstart new projects, or even improve livelihoods.



When assessing or applying interdisciplinarity, are there standards to measure against or should everyone be considered individually? What are pros or cons of each?