UNDERSTAND YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES - Funding
Our experience: we were very fortunate that our project had a large, flexible budget and we were able to utilise this to our advantage to encourage interdisciplinarity. Early on in the project a proportion of the budget was set aside to employ a project ethnographer (see Facilitation in this section). We were also able to use the budget to explore alternative methods such as employing a group of architecture students to produce models for us to use within research workshops as a visual aid to encouraging participation and dialogue. Similarly, when we were struggling with running the workshops and also being involved in them, we used the funding to employ neutral professional facilitators.
Why?
Like many of the points in this section, funding is another element which is relatively self-explanatory. The more funding you have the more you are able to do and the more you can experiment with methods and pushing at your interdisciplinarity.
With ample funding, and flexibility with that funding (see Time and Flexibility in this section), allows serendipity to play a positive role. There is more opportunity to engage in the time out activities discussed in the Get to know your colleagues section. Furthermore, enough funding may enable someone to be employed in a facilitation role, as discussed in this section; or enable other flexible staff roles to be produced, such as employing students or the use of external contractors with specific expertise. Funding may also allow the production of more creative outputs which are not solely focused on promoting your project’s work, as discussed in the section Evaluate, reflect and change.
If you do not have plentiful resources to engage in the activities above, or resources are tightly controlled to be used within particular areas, this does not mean that interdisciplinarity cannot occur. It merely means that more effort may be required to gather the team together to try and encourage interdisciplinary working. Many of the activities and advice sections within this tool kit can still be employed.