The MIRIAD Project
Many thanks to all those of you who attended the launch of the MIRIAD Project on October 31st. The aims of the project are to bring together academics from a range of arts related disciplines and academics and practitioners from any other discipline to explore the benefits of working across subjects.
A series of events will be held over the next year to progress these discussion into actual projects, the next one being at the end of January 2007, details of which will be published on this page when they are finalised. If you wish to contribute to the debate or are interested in hearing about the forthcoming discussion series please contact Professor John Hyatt at j.hyatt@mmu.ac.uk.
The MIRIAD Project 31st October 2006.
Panel Members summary and feedback.
Dr Cathy Garner, Chief Executive, Manchester Knowledge Capital
This event was important in bringing people together from the arts and
sciences backgrounds, and should continue and grow. There is a definite
need for sciences to be more innovative and creative rather than being
focussed on statistics and R&D.
The Knowledge Capital should be more embracing across disciplines, as there is too much emphasis on just science, and would support the efforts of the project to bring people from different disciplines together.
There was a need for more communication across sectors on the activities and opportunities to link together.
Dr George Baxter, Head of Science and Innovation, NWDA.
The problem goes right to the heart of education policy, as children in
England are asked to choose between subjects at a much earlier age than in
the rest of Europe where cultural subjects and science based subjects are
studied together for much longer, and there is a need to study both.
It would be useful for the tools and techniques of the arts to be used to help people understand science. People come for art and leave with science.
David Briggs, Director, Contact Partnership
There are opportunities for collaboration but there were issues for
institutions for the direction of resources to support cross-disciplinary
resources. There is also a need for greater communication. Also
Academics need support to ensure the scripts for bidding for funding from
city and regional resources are successful. Out of this would come a real
energy to develop collaborative projects for the region.
Meroë Candy, Sciart Project Manager, Wellcome Trust
There was a definite consensus about working across disciplines, a lot of
which is clearly already going on, but there was a long way for funders to
go to make this easier by taking people out of ‘boxes’ and definitions,
reducing boundaries between funding programmes and making sure that the
best people with the best projects were funded rather than projects which
ticked the right boxes.
Professor Joanna Verran, Professor of Microbiology, MMU
An event like this acknowledges that a lot of interdisciplinary activity
does already happen, but that there were difficulties internally in
helping academics work across disciplines.
Professor John Hyatt, Director of MIRIAD, MMU
Getting together today was incredibly valuable.
There was a need to create an environment for these types of discussions
to take place, and would be useful if there were more people from the
sciences attending because the point was that a balance must be reached.
In the world today the balance was tipped in the direction of science. The
MIRIAD Project has been conceived to address this and allow Knowledge plus
Insight to lead to Understanding and new ways of thinking about ideas of
development and progress in human culture.
As all the delegates have agreed that this discussion should take place again and that as MIRIAD was a transdisciplinary field the delegates agreed to MIRIAD organising the future discussions.
Future meetings should be more about 'doing things' rather than discussing but rather than dictating what should develop, the next meeting would allow the potential projects to develop naturally. As well as the sciences it would also be good to have representation from as may different subject areas as possible, for instance education, environment and languages and I am looking forward to a series of fruitful discussions.
