Interdisciplinary refers to cooperation across the boundaries of different departments and disciplines. Cross-cutting collaboration is essential to the understanding process. This takes place across disciplinary boundaries and helps to jointly analyze problems or find solutions.
Interdisciplinary work in general is the ability to develop innovative products, services and solutions to problems by means of interdisciplinary collaboration. Interdisciplinary teams have goals that they can only achieve together. Depending on the issue, for example, collaboration takes place between biologists, hydrologists, psychologists, lawyers, economists and geographers.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is also essential in buildings: Energy production, for example, used to be in the hands of a few companies. The energy transition represents the democratization of the energy world. Today, companies and end consumers are becoming so-called ‘prosumers’: They use as much of the energy they produce themselves as possible, feed it into a storage facility or into the grid. This requires new technical solutions and developments that are only possible in an interdisciplinary manner.
Another example is the bridge between IT and OT. In other words, the interaction between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT): programmers on the one hand, and classic heavy current and light current technicians on the other. These technology bridges can already be found in many homes. For example, if their building technology is fully automated and/or control via an app becomes possible.
=> Means: In a networked building, the most diverse sectors and trades build completely new solutions together. The progressive networking of the disciplines is changing the way work is done. The future is interdisciplinary and thus belongs to collaboration: In a networked building, it is essential to develop joint solutions with maximum load-bearing capacity with the sectors involved. The task is to form the right interdisciplinary teams and cooperations for this purpose. So-called “world changers” are needed to network these different trades and sectors with each other.
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