CyberSightings

In the Spotlight

In today's knowledge society, the need for interdisciplinary teamwork is compelling. In most work environments (and especially in scientific ones), the level of specialized expertise continues to grow, requiring employees to have the ability to work with people from very different backgrounds. As a result, an increasing number of careers require strong collaboration abilities, such as collective problem solving and high communication skills. Interdisciplinary collaboration is today regarded by companies and organizations as a key asset, not only for developing increasingly complex products and services, but also for designing new ones. Several studies have shown the role of collaboration among different expertises in fostering creativity and problem solving.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is also of paramount importance for the advance of cyberpsychology. As is evident from its name, the very goal of cyberpsychology is to combine technology and psychology by exploring how emerging media can be used to improve efficacy of research, practice, and training. Cyberpsychology professionals are well aware of the need to collaborate effectively with experts from other disciplines, with particular reference to informaticians and interactive systems designers. Unfortunately, this type of collaboration is often very complicated—especially when teamwork is aimed at developing innovative services and applications.

Over the past 15 years, I have been carrying out most of my research within the framework of interdisciplinary research and development projects, funded by various European Commission programs. On the basis of this experience, I have tried to identify some recurrent issues that affect the efficacy of collaboration between psychologists and different technology experts, such as software/hardware developers, computer scientists, engineers, and informaticians.

Having people from radically different backgrounds is the first, obvious issue. The kind of training that psychologists receive is usually oriented toward various humanistic or biomedical topics; only a few specialize in information technology–related disciplines (e.g., human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.).

A further challenge is related to the difficulty of defining a shared design framework/methodology. This issue is typically manifested during the early phases of the design process, when a list of functional requirements of a new ICT-based application or service needs to be identified. The definition of system functionalities often requires a formal modeling approach, which is not easily mastered by psychologists, even those with some background in interactive systems design. On the other hand, developers often find it difficult to explain to psychologists the constraints and boundaries of a specific system, in terms of what is technically (or budgetary) feasible.

A third problem concerns the difficulty in establishing a “common ground,” or the ability to define shared meanings for technical concepts derived from different knowledge domains. For example, the meaning of the word “ontology” varies significantly if interpreted within humanistic or informatics contexts. In philosophy, ontology is the study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. In contrast, computer science and information science use the term “ontology” to refer to a formal description of the meaning of the information stored in a system.

Obviously, this list could grow long. The ones I have mentioned are just a selection of the threats to collaboration that I have encountered in my own collaboration experience. Nevertheless, I am convinced that learning new ways to improve the efficacy of interdisciplinary teamwork is one of the most important needs that cyberpsychology is facing nowadays, and probably one of the major challenges for its future development.

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