4.3. Interruption as Continuity

For the full version of the original text go to The Economy of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer by Vannina Hofman, Jara Rocha and Josep Perelló.

Our success-worshipping system does not leave much room for abandoned paths, for projects that do not attain their original objectives, for outmoded or untimely inventions. Many fields of knowledge, such as media archaeology, look back at the past in search of these cases, analyse them, and give them value, because they believe that “dead ends, losers, and inventions that never made it into a material product have important stories to tell” (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011). Media archaeology attempts to create divergent histories that can transform the notion of history as linear progress. It recognises that research or inventions that do not appear to have been successful, or which were abandoned prematurely, may have influenced subsequent events. Or at least that acknowledging their existence can help us to construct a more complete and more complex history of socio-technical innovations, of the media, and also of art. The ongoing re-evaluation arising from the process-based dynamic of interdisciplinary projects generates spaces for reflection and renewal. For example, a community may decide to terminate the project during one of those self-valuation breaks, as long as the option was allowed for in the original negotiations. But does it make sense to simply throw away the whole process up to that point, so that the knowledge archaeologists of the future will have to reconstruct it? We need to find ways to represent and transfer knowledge related to a research project that is cut short, and to the processes leading to the termination of a project at different levels of the community and its boundaries. An unsuccessful project would then become a precedent for the community (if it continues to exist) and for other communities that try to follow similar paths. Some disciplinary traditions consider the documentation of “error” in a more positive light than others. Likewise, certain entrepreneurial sectors appear to consider the sum of previous failures to be a sine qua non for success. No matter what earlier attitudes exist, the possible interruption of the project and its conditions should ideally be placed on the table at the start of an interdisciplinary process.

An emblematic example when talking about complex systems is the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute that employs very few permanent researchers, and where the first thing you are asked to do is to work in a field other then your own. This forced shift has generated supra-disciplinary methodologies, led to the application of certain disciplines in fields other than their own, and even to the invention of new disciplines. When terminating a project, it is important to consider certain aspects and the questions associated with them:

INTERRUPTION FOLLOWED BY CONTINUITY WITH CHANGES:

- Should the project be interrupted and totally discarded, or can it be recycled through some kind of “spin off”?

- Can the project be entirely or partially continued by another community?

- Can the project continue under other models (methodological and financing)?

CONSENSUS:

- Is there an agreement in place about interrupting the project? Was it one of the possible scenarios negotiated at the start?

- What methods are to be used when deciding whether to interrupt and/or continue with alternatives?

COSTS:

- Has the community considered how to manage the costs involved in an interruption?

- Even when a project has been interrupted, is funding available for dissemination of the process and its results, even if they were not the expected outcomes?