When the shortboard revolution came to surfing from the late 60’s to the early 80’s, it was not led by the current celebrated leaders, it was propelled by upstarts.
When Facebook was created in dorm rooms, it wasn’t designed by scholars and celebrated acedemics.
Before Biz Stone founded twitter, he had told his high-school teachers that he wouldn’t be doing any homework while at school, but as a trade he would pay attention in class.
The disruptors behind these movements don’t care about discipline – the lines in the sand that have been drawn by people and industries before them. In fact, they are often anti-discipline.
In 2011 Joi Ito was appointed the new director of the MIT Media Lab, he coined the term ‘antidisciplinarity’ to describe the environment of the space at MIT, which has played a role in dozens of big ideas and creations:
Antidisciplinarity is in opposition to the status quo, or general convention. It slants towards processes that are open, collaborative, and decentralised. This stuff often applies to software, but is more and more spreading to hardware, physical products and even communities and practices.
This ability to break down barriers can not only improve your work, but it can allow us to bring in aspects of different ways of living, including practices and habits from different cultures that may not be the norm. The ability and tendency to blur the lines and understand relationships over rules and discipline an also be considered a practice – it turns out we can even go as far as training for this type of thing.
