Interdisciplinary research programs, like DesCartes, often face significant challenges in fostering effective collaboration across their diverse constituent disciplines. These barriers primarily stem from differences in terminology, methodologies, and paradigms unique to each field. As a result, researchers struggle to articulate complex ideas across disciplinary boundaries, leading to misunderstandings and missed opportunities for creative and innovative collaborations.The "ABC's of DesCartes" emerges as a response to these barriers in interdisciplinary collaboration. This project aims to involve researchers from across the DesCartes program in collaboratively co-creating a simple "ABCs" glossary—a shared vocabulary drawn from the program's rich diversity of research domains.
The project takes inspiration from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, and follows the format of a children’s ABC book (where there is a concept for every letter of the alphabet around a specific theme, e.g., "ABC’s of Science" with A for Astronomy, B for Biology, C for Chemistry, and so on), the project transforms this familiar structure into an engaging, educational experience. The upcoming ‘ABCs DesCartes’ book will feature 26 spreads, each representing a letter of the alphabet and an associated AI-related term. These terms, selected for their relevance to the DesCartes program's research areas, are explained through layered definitions. Readers will be presented with a general explanation to introduce the term, a more nuanced interpretation from a specific discipline, and a contextualized definition highlighting its application within the DesCartes program’s efforts to build Hybrid AI technologies for Singapore.
The content of the installation is grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration, a hallmark of the DesCartes program. Each definition is crafted through a rigorous process where researchers from diverse fields work together in pairs to define each term. This process begins with an open call for term suggestions, followed by a structured selection process conducted by an editorial committee composed of researchers across different work packages. Once a term is selected, two researchers—often from different disciplines—are paired to co-define it. Through facilitated dialogues, they engage in a structured epistemic game that includes multiple stages: familiarization, knowledge sharing, perspective-taking, negotiation, and consensus-building. This structured format ensures that each participant actively listens to and articulates the other’s perspective before collaboratively crafting a shared definition that integrates both general and specialized insights.
These definitions are then refined collaboratively by an editorial team to ensure clarity, coherence, and accessibility. Each definition is formatted in three layers: (1) a general definition akin to a dictionary entry, (2) a discipline-specific definition reflecting expert knowledge, and (3) a DesCartes-specific definition that contextualizes the term within the program’s Hybrid AI framework. This iterative and structured process ensures that the final definitions facilitate meaningful dialogue across disciplines while capturing the situated knowledge of DesCartes researchers.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSsVFxhDajE8gMJa1sxXutwOiczHZwZm1BuPIraK63yFrQXgP8ybDodw-dn_nITASUMvMVCCKTfOaAr/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000
Through a structured approach inspired by the concept of "epistemic games," ABC's DesCartes provides a platform for researchers to articulate, understand, and synthesize diverse perspectives. This co-creation exercise not only seeks to break down communication barriers and facilitate more effective collaboration among researchers in DesCartes but also aims to produce a tangible end-product - the ABC’s DesCartes book/glossary. This glossary will enable the sharing of context-specific knowledge with the broader academic community and the general public.