Interdisciplinary Scientific Collaborations
The practice of science is changing radically due to the introduction of computer modeling, and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research teams, where members do not share a common background. A full understanding of the challenges facing such interdisciplinary teams has yet to be achieved by scientists, university administrators, funding agencies or science studies scholars. In particular, the role of cultural and disciplinary practices and what it means to make models within a particular discipline and how they should be interpreted has not been investigated. We conducted research on an interdisciplinary team working on a new remote surgery protocol. We focused on team meetings which had as their goal to impart knowledge, to coordinate knowledge states and to critique individual team members' progress and procedures towards the collaborative goal. At the meetings team members collaborate on visual renderings to solve a number of complex engineering problems applied to medicine. They are writing a scenario from the physical world into the virtual world, and then reading it and critiquing it. Team members must translate their own forms of representation and learn new symbolic "languages" representing different ways of characterizing the known or predicted in a biological or an engineering process. They must trust decisions of others about accuracy, integrity, and convention, identifying relevant known and unknown areas.