SIDE EFFECTS OF COOPERATION 17

Decisions made in actual multidisciplinary situations are determined by
the procedures that participants have expressly or implicitly agreed on for
resolving disagreements. When researchers work for designers or designers for
researchers in a traditional consultant relationship, for examplef‘intradiscipli-
nary procedures are used. One person works within the discipline of the other.
The member of the primary discipline retains responsibility for the outcome of
the process and has final authority in making decisions—for example, whether
to spend resources to carry out further research on a problem. A researcher
working for a designer in such a situation might say “Although my scientific
norms say I ought to study the problem longer, I will stop because the design-
ers in charge decided that I have provided them with enough information on
which to base their decision.” In intradisciplinary settings, consultants learn
how other people solve problems, and consultants influence the solution to the
degree that they visibly contribute to the decision maker’s definition of the
problem. The better suited the contribution is to the accepted problem defini—
tion, the more the consultants control the effects of their input.

Some problems can be solved by dividing them into sub-problems so that
team members from different disciplines can separately apply their own profes-
sional standards. For example, if a client wants a building both built and eval-
uated, a design and research team might decide to carry out the two sets of tasks
separately but in parallel. Investigators decide when POE research is needed and
when findings may be published; designers decide when design concepts are suf-
ficie tly informed and when buildings go into construction. These procedures
are kerdisci linary because they rely for their success on how well participants
construct links between two or more separate disciplines. Responsibility for
each part remains separate, but team members have joint responsibility for the
quality of the links.

Possibly the most rewarding procedures to use are ones in which team
members jointly decide what to do throughout a project. Employing such trans-
disciplinary procedures, the criteria the team use neither wholly reflect any one
discipline nor join different disciplines. They are new procedures developed by
team members who respect each other’s disciplinary norms, rewards, and sanc-
tions and who are willing and able to reevaluate their own norms in the light
of the team’s common goals.

The flexibility a team has to instituteyansdisciplinary decision-making
procedures 18 controlled by the real setting in which the team works, by clients,
and by members’ energies. Team members making transdisciplinary decisions
benefit by engaging in tasks that are not part of their normal work; for instance,
designers may assess the validity of research methods and researchers may gen-
erate design images. They all benefit by carrying out entirely new tasks; for
example, designers may analyze their own completed plans to identify implica-
tions for behavior they were not aware of while designing and from these for-
mulate research hypotheses. Each team member benefits by inventing new types
of shared presentation methods and by increasing the number and types of tools
he or she can use separately, such as behaviorally annotated plans and behav-
ioral design performance programs.