Ill-Defined Knowledge Boundaries; A Battlefield for Transdisciplinary Engineering

Abstract

Relying on an one-year longitudinal study of developing a product to be assembled in refugee camps around the globe, this paper aims at studying whether a battlefield exists among the practitioners involved, caused by ill-defined knowledge boundaries and how to penetrate these. The paper juxtaposes the empirical material with the theoretical conceptualisation of affordance to show that the drawbacks of knowledge boundaries emerged after long and intense discussions rather late in the development. Indeed, it was necessary to arrange a workshop in which the practitioners gained hands-on experience to reveal the drawbacks of knowledge boundaries. To mitigate drawbacks of knowledge boundaries, this paper suggests that transdisciplinary engineering should be a fundamental activity, which takes place throughout the development. Practitioners facing ill-defined knowledge boundaries should adapt and apply a common framework including various artefacts to guide both the practical work and their discussions to gain hands-on experience.