Cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines

The Refinement ClubMating Ideas

#MassRefinement 05

CROSS-POLLINATING IDEAS ACROSS DISCIPLINES


The Refinement Clubstarted with us, Johannes Rummelhoff and Gro Larsson, meeting to solve problems and publish concepts, but evolved into being a forum for sharing ideas. We brought in Benedikte Kluge to help organize what we now call Mass-Refinements.

Mass-Refinements are about bringing people together to share their ideas and thoughts on a certain subject. We then take the input from the session and put it in context. This time we talked about the future of the book.


How can we encourage and facilitate the sharing of ideas,

experience and knowledge across disciplines in society

in general?


‣ Cross-connecting Your mind cross-connects ideas, thoughts, insights, experiences and biases. Your increasing knowledge and experience feeds your creativity and shapes new ideas.

‣ Sharing When you mix people with seemingly unrelated perspectives/ knowledge/ insights all this melts together with each other and cross-connects and forms new and unexpected connections between neurons in your brain, connections which forms new ideas.

‣ Start early The habits you develop during your years of education tends to stick. And that’s why you should get accustomed to work interdisciplinary while still studying.

INSIGHTS


‣ Low-threshold If it’s easy to share your thoughts and ideas with other people, it’s more likely that you will do it and you will hopefully do it more often. That’s why its important to focus on making services and initiatives that are easy to participate in.

‣ Using existing services It’s easier to use things that you’re already familiar with and it is more likely that you care about changes or initiatives happening in familiar surroundings.

INSIGHTS


THE JOB SWITCHGet out of your comfort zone.A day a month/ quarter/ year when you work with something that you’re not familiar with, and that’s not your main skill/field. For example a programmer working as a graphic designer for a day.


THE QUIZConnecting people with different backgrounds in a "friendly competition"Most people like bar quizzes. Why not play it in the comfort of your couch?

Connect students from different disciplines in teams participating in the quiz.

As participants register with information about what they are studying and their different areas of interest, the application connects X number of students with different backgrounds to get variety in the teams.

Side activities may be to meet for the awards ceremony, tournament, IRL pub quiz with the same team that you had in the app.


THE REAL LIFE GUILDBuild a guild to master your real life questsA social network where you make a resource bank of people who fill your blanks and compliments your skills and knowledge.

This can also be a site that helps students connect with other types of students. The students can state their quest and collect an interdisciplinary guild to accomplish their academic goals.


IDEA BATTLESArrange interesting idea battles where different people with different knowledge and expertise battle each other out by building upon each others ideas. Last man standing. When you can't think of anything new you're out.

This could also work with randomly generated teams. The teams get an assignment and battle each other. This is actually a competition of collaboration and communication, since the team that have the better skills in that area would manage to get the best result.


CONNECTING STUDENT PUBSHooking up tables at student pubs with phones/web-camera which are directly connected to another pub with totally different students. This way you can have random encounters and get to know people totally different from you. Hopefully such an encounter could be the start of a collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas.


#IDEAUsing well-known social networks to share ideasShare ideas on twitter using the hashtag #idea, but also aggregating the feed on an external site where you can see how the ideas have evolved from one single tweet/idea to a massive concept. A follow/subscribe to the ideas you find interesting feature should also be included.

It is also possible to use Google+ and Hangouts to collaborate further on the ideas.

+ Can be implemented NOW+ easy+ Low input threshold


INTERNSHIPSCoordinate internship periods at different schoolsSome issues are just practical thresholds. Like if you want to apply for internship with a person who’s expertise and talent complements yours, but their school has their internship period at a different time.

If schools could coordinate their internship periods, a graphic design student could intern in a team with students studying e.g business and computer engineering. Think how valuable their input would be to a business, and the students themselves, compared to a team consisting of one type of expertise?


IDEAS CONCEIVED AT THE REFINEMENT CLUB’S #MASSREFINEMENT 05


‣ Westerdals School of Communication‣ Benedikte Kluge‣ Gro Larsson‣ Johannes Rummelhoff

FACILITATED BY:

Thanks to all the participants!


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Cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines