When I arrived at LIS two and half months ago, I firmly believed that interdisciplinarity in school and work meant mixing techniques and working in teams. By mixing techniques I mean to broaden our way of thinking at a problem by looking at it from a different perspective technique-wise. For instance, in brainstorming I used to always need to write down in a linear way and make lists of endless bullet points. One day I tried mixing techniques by using tools like Miro to mind-map my ideas and now I do both techniques. I believed that being interdisciplinary wasn’t meant to be qualifying the abilities of one person but the abilities of a group. I believed that having an interdisciplinary approach on a project meant bringing on this specific project different people with each one having their own qualifications and by working together and bringing in new perspectives, the project would therefore be interdisciplinary thanks to the contribution of each person. 

When starting the courses at LIS, my mind has been broadened about what interdisciplinary means. We first tackled the topic of “complex problems” that were a new concept to me. I had to accept that a problem doesn’t always carry an easy solution out and that I had to overcome my frustration of having to sometimes not find any concrete answer. This opened my mind to the notion that to think of a topic or to reflect on a problem, the more knowledge you have the deeper you can go into reflection but also the more you’re going to see things differently. When I went to my first “Thinking out Loud” event, the presentation that was made by Najid, one of the students from LIS, I at first struggled to understand where he was going with all the different topics he was referring to because my mind couldn’t see a clear red thread, but as the presentation kept going and as the discussions then emerged, I started to understand the real mindset of the school and how the students here are trained to “think outside the box”. This presentation crossed different topics and techniques (videos, book extracts, ads…) and the discussions that emerged from it were truly insightful. I was impressed to see the depth of the comments and the large connections the students were able to make to link the topics. This was the first step for me to understand the methods of LIS and of interdisciplinarity.

Then we started the different courses of our program at LIS. Coming here, I expected to have classes fully dedicated to Sustainability as a continuity of what we have learned at emlyon. I was then surprised and quite destabilized at first to realize our classes didn’t really connect with our main themes in the program nor to sustainability. All classes were truly interesting and I learned a lot through the discussions with the teachers who are very passionate about their topics. Here are my main takeaways in the different courses we had. 

In Culture and Behaviors, I realized and dipped into what culture means beyond the historical aspect of a population. The different layers composing our personal culture truly depend on millions of factors and knowing one’s culture is to be emotionally more clever in understanding their actions. Our culture can therefore be considered as interdisciplinary as it is built over time through all the interactions and choices we make. Before that course, I always saw culture as a group concept and here I understood more about the personal culture we all have.

In Law and Ethics, I learned to be more aware of regulations and the laws applying around me in daily situations. This helped during our visit to Luton airport and Stratford as I surprised myself looking for the signs implying the usage of certain laws especially regarding privacy in those areas. It also made me reflect on the importance of being critical to the laws put in place in a country and question the ethics of some. I was particularly touched by the book “Guantanamo Bay” that Emma Rengers lent me during P3. This book was shocking to me and a hard way to learn about ethics and human rights.

In Systems and Resources, we learned about shaping our minds. Those different systems that were presented to us are real tools to apply in different settings in our lives (personal and professional). The course that marled me most was the course of Christian Constantinescu. Being an intermediate musician myself, I never thought of the process of creating music as a system. Discovering the automation and potential futures of music with AI were things I never thought about when thinking of music and composing. This has broadened my mind in this specific field but I easily made connections with other fields I could apply those systems in.

Those three courses combined with the visits and events at LIS made me understand the importance of broadening my mind beyond crossing tools to work with an interdisciplinary approach. I understand now the importance of going higher by crossing methods but also fields to enrich my work and make it multi-dimensional. Today, after spending a few weeks at LIS, I feel more open-minded and curious about considering different paths to go from an idea to a result. I now pay more attention to the process of creating and reflecting than to the actual result. Because the more time I spend on the process, the richer and more clever the result will be, and it follows naturally emerging from the connections between all the different fields and methods I would have used.