Disconnect of disciplines

What has calligraphy got to do with building computers? Yet, Steve Jobs credits the inspiration to come up with beautiful fonts for the Mac to having some calligraphy skill — which he got by simply following some curiosity. This is one example of how separate disciplines come together to create something beautiful.

In Star Trek, a sci-fi franchise, the language Klingon is fictional — not spoken by any tribe/people on Earth. For realism, the language needed to be consistent. This means a language needed to be created. One of my favorite albums, The Incredible True Story by Logic, is one where the artist mixes the concepts of space travel and philosophy beautifully. Cars like the McLaren, Porsche are a blend of genius engineering, design, art and psychology¹ — not just engineering.

Without cross-disciplines, a lot of things wouldn’t exist. It takes the cross discipline of music-making and programming to build sampling/mixing applications. Martial arts and good storytelling to make cool action movies. I, for one, studied Business (as a course) in senior high school. When building Adeton, I applied simple financial accounting principles I learned in school to manage transactions.

I bring this topic up because I notice a total disconnect of disciplines here at school. Engineering events are purely about engineering and for the students of engineering. LLB (Law) programmes are purely law and for law students. I find this very troubling on a gigantic scale. I acknowledge that an engineering student cannot learn so much about law or vise versa but there should be a connection. A connection where either disciplines acknowledges the presence of the other, regularly communicates advancements in the respective fields and ultimately, how one can have an effect on the other.

Realization

Watching Tetris somewhere last year opened my eyes to the idea of “software salesmanship”; and the whole software licensing business — a big industry, but I digress. This meant there were people who didn’t write software, didn’t have engineering backgrounds but were able to sell software and games to people (or organizations) that needed them. But we have people reading Marketing that will have a difficult time wrapping their heads around selling software. Basically because they have no idea how software is made nor the people involved — who are just mates in other departments.

I can only speak with bias for software engineering. I have spoken with a number of people reading computer engineering and computer science and everyone (not an exaggeration) works on commerce software. This is a symptom of the disconnect of disciplines.

There are so many problems to solve. It’s from engaging with these other disciplines that we get insight to kind of problems that can benefit from our respective disciplines. A lot of inefficiencies in our economy can be attribute to the ignorance of disciplines. For example, tax filing: can this process be automated for companies? Can gari production be cleaner and efficient? Can we better predict seasons for farming and tracking whole farming processes?

My part

I would always talk about problem I’m interested in solving (now or in future). For this particular problem, I attempted to solve this with the Events feature of compa. On this page, events happening across campus can be shared so that everyone else can see.

I have also spoken to some stakeholders in other colleges to consider the idea of making events more public to other colleges. Perhaps, ask college students to invite students from other colleges.

Hopes

My hopes are that: when we are able to create an environment where disciplines are connected, we can have vibrant relationships, develop amazing ideas and ultimately transform the lives of so many people and our country 🇬🇭.