The Knowledge Integration Super-Power

Let's start with some background. Where did you grow up, and what attracted you to engineering? What were your other interests growing up?

I grew up in Ottawa, attended a French immersion school through grade five, and then spent grade six in an English language school. At age twelve, my family moved to Paris, where we lived for three years. During this time, we traveled around Europe, and I became familiar with the work of such artists as Gauguin, Monet and Picasso. We then returned to Ottawa where I finished high school. Throughout, I was a typical science-math geek. I was always interested in how things work and liked taking things apart (even my parents' car!) and constructing my own computers.

I decided to pursue the Electrical Engineering program at University of Waterloo, largely because it was the hardest program to get into in Canada at that time. I was also attracted to the UW Co-op program, which allowed students to get two years of work experience with up to six employers before graduation.

In Engineering I was on a curricular conveyer belt, with my sequence of courses rigorously mapped out by others. This provided  important disciplinary depth but definitely reduced my opportunities for breadth in coursework beyond Engineering. At the time this seemed logical to me; it was only later in life that I came to realize how much was missing from that education, including a lot of things that would have made me a better engineer!

Why continue with your advanced degrees? 

I graduated during a recession when jobs were scarce but received a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree. During graduate school I had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant and discovered a love and aptitude for teaching.  I was particularly excited (and I think good at) finding multiple ways of explaining a concept and trying new approaches until one of them stuck with the student. This experience led to my decision to pursue a PhD so that I could teach at the university level, which I obtained in 1997.

I then earned a fellowship to do post-doctoral work in mechatronics, which gave me an opportunity to combine electronics, mechanical engineering, and software development. I discovered I could solve problems more effectively and efficiently by integrating these different disciplines, coming up with a solution to belt vibration control that no disciplinarian would have considered.

During my post-doc I was recruited by Waterloo Engineering to help start the Mechatronics Engineering program, and taught in Engineering from 2000 to 2010, when I moved over to KI.

Artists can often think up installations that they cannot build; they lack the technical expertise. You have made many such projects a reality. How did this happen?

A project with local artist Ernest Detwiler was my first such collaboration. He conceived of a sculpture that included two large satellite dishes facing each other on opposite sides of a canal and needed motors to help parts of them rotate. The mechanical requirements were completely outside of his expertise but offered quite an easy problem for me to solve. I realized then that Engineering gave me an incredible superpower: when I applied my disciplinary knowledge in a different context, I could make other peoples' creative visions come true. It seemed magical!

Around the same time, my brother Matt, his partner Susan and I visited an exhibition of contemporary art which included several great examples of tech art. Soon thereafter we submitted a proposal to a major exhibition called CAFKA.02: Power to the People, which celebrated one hundred years of electricity in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. The proposal wasn't just accepted, it was funded, and the jury asked that the piece be doubled in size and placed outside. It was very successful and even won an award from a local arts organization.

And things have snowballed from there. In 2004 I developed and co-taught a course in Technology Art with Bruce Taylor in Waterloo’s Fine Arts department, which included ten Engineering and ten Sculpture students. Rather than just creating prototypes, the students had to complete their interactive projects and display  them in a public show. This required a mind-shift, for me and the Engineering students, as we negotiated a new set of goals, priorities, and working methods. Since then I’ve continued to collaborate with artists on increasingly complex projects. My work with architect Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG) has pushed this process even further.

I understand you've worked with Beesley on numerous complex projects, including Hylozoic Ground which was Canada’s entry in the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture. This must push your engineering “superpower” to the limit. What do you contribute and what do you gain through this work?

I’ve been working with Philip for nearly two decades, and with the studio team we’ve designed, built and installed dozens of architectural-scale interactive environments in museums and galleries all over the world.  Each one pushes the limits of interdisciplinary collaboration, physical design, and mechatronics, so that we’re not only creating amazing objects but inventing new ways of doing things. So what I gain is a least twofold. First, we continually advance the state of the art technologically and physically. Second (and more importantly to me), our ongoing collaboration is an amazing “sandbox” in which to explore interdisciplinary collaboration and think about how disciplinarians can better work together to solve the world’s important problems.  In essence, it’s a place to “practice what I preach” and definitely informs my classroom teaching on integrative collaboration.

How does your thinking process as an engineer differ from your thinking process as an educator and a designer? And how does it inform your work as an educator?

Actually, by turning everything into a design problem, I can apply the same problem-solving approach consistently. I need to thoroughly understand the problem (or conflict), identify the stakeholders, identify constrains and criteria, develop options, pick the most promising and then test and revise (a process called iteration) until I reach a solution. So, when developing a course, I start with what I want students to learn, consider how this course can contribute to their overall degree, from what assignments will help students learn the most and so on.

As a relatively small department with few requirements, KI must maximize the impact of every required course. Can you describe how some of the preceding courses set the stage for the museum course?

The museum project is designed to allow students to apply and integrate all their learning thus far.  They use design process learned in their first-year Design Thinking (INTEG 121) course to carry out their projects.  Each student on the team brings their own perspective and expertise, learned through their electives, to bear on the topic.  They use knowledge about how people learn from The Art & Science of Learning (INTEG 120) course and museum-specific learning frameworks from the Introduction to Museums (INTEG 230) course to think about how to effectively communicate their topic to their target audience.  The Nature of Scientific Knowledge (INTEG 220) gives them research and critical thinking skills, and The Social Nature of Knowledge (INTEG 221) allows them to think carefully about how different visitors might experience their exhibit, which is important in pedagogical design. Finally, the 10-day field trip we take to Europe at the end of second year gives them lots of case study museum experience to inform their own designs.

The Museum Course seems to require an unusual degree of knowledge integration--which culminates in the spring exhibition.

The museum course is jam packed, full of both explicit and implicit learning, as well as the opportunity to practice applied knowledge integration.  Students identify a compelling topic for a specific target audience, become experts in the topic, then design a museum exhibit that incorporates text, objects, and activities to convey the topic to their visitors.  They have to figure out how to communicate their expert knowledge to a “lay person,” and how to include multiple learning modes to reach the greatest number of visitors.  Then, they need to physically build all that and we open it to the public for a week in March; last year’s exhibit saw 700 visitors come through and learn about Sex Ed, Alternative Farming Techniques, Mind-Body Connections, Hostile Architecture, Community Belonging, The Dark Side of Online Shopping, and The Perils of Single Use Objects [more here]. In addition to all that explicit learning, students learn to deal with group conflict, delegate tasks, and manage/budget a large project.

How does the Museum Course  set the stage for the students’ Senior Honours Project?

Duration is important in both cases. Sustained work over a years' time expands the level of ambition, heightens the need for project management, and requires consistent work toward a major goal. The big difference, of course, is that the fourth year SHP is typically a solo project. Students must design and pursue a big project of personal significance for two terms. This requires a heightened level of independence, self-regulation, strong research skills, and grit.

Students in your museum course come from all sorts of backgrounds. How can their various modes of thinking best be combined when they work collaboratively?

In the best collaborations, disciplinary differences are a strength. They make it possible for a team to complete tasks that individuals couldn't even consider. In the worst cases, miscommunication and frustration prevail. In KI, we explicitly teach students how to leverage these differences so that they are an asset rather than a challenge.

When there are large gaps between disciplines, epistemic humility and a willingness to accept input from others become especially important. This applies to each professor in the program as well as every student. I am surrounded by experts in fields ranging from the philosophy of science to climate change and get to teach students with interests in every conceivable area. Every day, I am challenged to grow my understanding of knowledge and its implications.

Interdisciplinary programs have been touted by many universities in recent years and new programs are being developed. Many, though, seem more like a collection of courses rather than a cohesive curriculum. What makes KI special?

Typical interdisciplinary programs allow students to take courses from different units on campus, often delivering a Bachelor of Arts & Science degree.  KI differs in these key ways. 

• The degree is unique—a Bachelor of Knowledge Integration—and our alumni tell us this gives them a strategic advantage on the job market. 

• The core course sequence is explicitly designed to encourage students to integrate the knowledge they’re gaining from these different disciplines.

• KI professors are all interdisciplinary themselves, as opposed to specialists drawn from different disciplines.  This means they can speak very practically to knowledge integration, from their own personal experiences.

Your career has been varied and your accomplishments are impressive. You always seen to have many projects bubbling along. What are you most actively pursuing now and why is it most important? 

Oh my gosh. So many things!  I’m helping to lead a team designing an innovative teaching incubator on campus which will change the way Waterloo thinks about academics and academic programming, I continue to work with the LASG on exciting new installation projects, and of course I’m teaching the Museum Course! When teaching and learning are viewed through a knowledge integration lens, the possibilities seem endless!

This interview is part of a project conducted by Dr. Mary Stewart during her two-month fellowship at the University of Waterloo in the fall of 2022. Thank you to Dr. Stewart for her work in highlighting the transdisciplinary nature of the KI program and its community members, and to Fulbright Canada for making this opportunity possible.