Picturing what others know

Abstract

In many complex, multi-faceted, problem-solving situations there is a growing need to pull together various competences and backgrounds, i.e. a need to better balance specialisation and interdisciplinarity. But when scientific backgrounds, skills, references, specialized languages and specialized knowledge are too far apart people involved in an interdisciplinary process face a real communication challenge. Communication is here not the best word-it minors the challenge. What actors face is the challenge to reach a common understanding of facts and of pictures of facts, in other words to build a common, unambiguous, knowledge space. Not making this effort often results in misunderstandings, and accordingly in delays and inefficiency. At the end of the day, results may turn out as a nice patchwork rather than as new knowledge. In this contribution we show that it can be worth having actors get aware of distances between them, of overlaps and non-overlaps in terms of methods, specialised language, references and concepts. We present a series of short experiments that are an attempt to "measure" and then visualize the above mentioned distances, and can act as eye openers for a community.