These terms, while seemingly similar, are pretty different. Understanding their differences is, in some ways, the key to understanding one of them: interdisciplinarity. For many reasons, interdisciplinarity is essential when studying here at the Futures Institute (EFI). First, the philosophical construct holds each program—and all programs—together, irrespective of your specific topic of study. Secondly, what makes interdisciplinarity interesting is that you see how often we don’t use this approach in most real-life situations. As a comparison, multidisciplinary is a grouping of various subject matter experts, each approaching a problem through their unique lens. Interdisciplinarity also brings multiple experts together but instead finds ways of bringing them. The critical difference is that the various experts become “integrated” into a more robust approach to solving a problem.
From my standpoint, interdisciplinarity seems preferable to multidisciplinarity but requires metacognition to achieve it, which not everyone is capable of. Also, its inherent weakness seems to be that everyone has to buy into it for it to work. If someone prefers to stay in their narrow swim lane and refuses to participate in that manner, then interdisciplinarity begins to break down. Therefore, as a methodology, everyone must be aligned on the approach when starting a new project.
The value of interdisciplinarity was illustrated to me by The Fable of the Elephant, a short and amusing story in which an architect, engineer, sociologist, and interior designer all get together to collectively figure out how to design the house for the elephant. Each applies their knowledge based on their individual expertise, resulting in a house unusable for the elephant. Moreover, the knowledge of the elephant is never incorporated, underscoring the need for non-academic participants.
Incorporating non-academics is the primary differentiation of transdisciplinarity, which erases all lines of distinction to create a unified version of disciplines formed around a single vision.