Transdisciplinary Collaboration in "Cell"

The ideas we describe in this chapter on transdisciplinary collaboration, and our belief that such collaboration can have a positive impact on the practice of computing, are based on the experience of working on an interdisciplinary project (Cell) looking into innovative theories of stem cell behavior. The collaboration involved an artist (Jane Prophet), a mathematician (Mark d’Inverno), a liver pathologist (Neil Theise), an artificial life (Alife) programmer (Rob Saunders), and a curator/producer (Peter Ride). We report on the project, our backgrounds, and the nature of process-based interdisciplinary research. We discuss our experience of negotiating discipline-specific positions on a number of aesthetic qualities that have in turn led to a change in our understanding of the aesthetics of computing. In the right circumstances, we propose, interdisciplinary research transcends the individual disciplines and can potentially be what we call transdisciplinary—that is, the impact of disciplines on each other is strong enough to fundamentally affect the disciplines themselves, including computer science.