I have visited the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Coimbra over the last couple of days. During two packed days, I got to hear exciting presentations by various researchers, present how we work at RITMO, and engage in lively discussions about how best to organise interdisciplinary research activities.
The “coffee machine” philosophy
Many people are curious about how we run RITMO, which brings together around 60 researchers from musicology, psychology, and informatics to interact on a daily basis. There are not many centres around that are as “radically” interdisciplinary as us, to use a term commonly used by the Research Council of Norway to describe research activities crossing between the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences.
When I am pushed to explain how the “magic” happens, my best example is to point out that we have put the coffee machine right at the entrance of RITMO. It is placed just 2 meters from the main door, in an open kitchen area, to ensure it doubles as a social space and meeting room. It is also right next to our administration’s offices, and further down the corridor are the shared offices of our doctoral and postdoctoral fellows.
The coffee machine is at the heart of RITMO.
The coffee machine thus becomes the natural meeting point for everyone and the best place to hang out and meet people. I cannot stress the importance of creating meeting points enough. There is no quick fix to creating interdisciplinary collaborations. They require that people meet and engage in conversation.
Code of Conduct
Right next to the coffee machine, our code of conduct hangs. It was developed jointly at our first retreat and has been revised a couple of times since. The code of conduct reinforces values of diversity and friendliness, creating an atmosphere where researchers feel safe to explore “strange things” and “cool projects” that emerge spontaneously from being together.
RITMO’s code of conduct hangs strategically next to the coffee machine.
Counteracting structural silos
Everyone who has tried to work interdisciplinarily knows that it is hard. Institutional structures function as “silos,” with departments and faculties having their own local cultures and reward systems. At RITMO, we spend significant administrative effort to level out such differences so that recruits from different departments have the same experience.
We also foster a culture of collaboration, where people from different disciplines naturally collaborate. This helps researchers navigate fundamental differences in their motivations, such as the ideas-driven nature of the humanities, the hypothesis-driven approach of psychology, the data-driven nature of informatics, and the making-driven focus of arts and engineering.
In addition to coffee machine discussions, we have also developed some concrete exercises that we run at retreats from time to time:
These are examples of how to build an interdisciplinary research environment.