What Can We Gain from Transdisciplinary Visualization Courses?

Abstract

Transdisciplinary education means going even further in the collaboration with other disciplines than multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education do. Transdisciplinary education attempts to search for new insights and views that emerge by balancing the importance of each participating discipline. Because most visualization problems are posted by disciplines other than Computer Science and because good solutions to visualization problems span knowledge over different disciplines, we often find interest from students outside the CS area in our visualization courses. This panel will discuss transdisciplinary (as well as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary) visualization courses from four different viewpoints of the four panellists: What do multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education mean in practical terms for an educator of a visualization course? What benefits does an applied research institute expect from graduates that have experience in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary versus unidisciplinary collaboration? Will there be enough interest from non-CS students to attend such visualization courses?