Antidisciplinary

Many of the technologies that we take for granted today, like GPS and touchscreens, trace their routes back to MIT's Media Lab, which has a broad range of research areas across science, art, media, and more.

In his book The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices, former MIT Media Lab director Frank Moss describes the inner workings of the lab, including a story about a group focused on designing an exoskeleton-like device that could make running easier.

Among the many challenges the group faced was the problem of attaching it comfortably to people's bodies. Skin tends to slide across bones, which makes attaching an external device like this difficult.

Hazel Briner, an undergraduate intern at the time, ultimately solved the problem by sewing non-slip fabric under the straps. Moss points out that not only was Briner a capable sewer, she also spent four years touring as an aerialist with Circus Smirkus, the internationally recognized youth circus. As such, Briner's previous experience with harnesses informed her solution.

With an interest in both circus and biomechatronics, Briner is clearly a curious person. The world tends to reward curiosity like this; when you follow your nose down the paths that interest you, you never know how the things you learn along the way can be combined to solve novel problems down the road.

And exploring broadly and cultivating a sense of curiosity in everything that you do doesn't just help you solve problems.

If you approach meeting new people with that same spark of curiosity, you're more likely to assume that everyone is interesting. This in turn leads to richer conversations and deeper social connections.

So default to curious. You never know where it might lead you.

Although knowledge in a specific discipline resembles a tree, knowledge across disciplines resembles a forest — a latticework of facts and ideas with many crisscrossing connections.

Much of our progress now comes from finding these novel relationships between subjects. As I recently wrote, Claude Shannon did this when he paired Boolean alegra with circuitry design, which laid the foundation for modern computers.

And Shannon's cross-disciplinary breakthrough is not an anomaly. David Epstein in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, writes, "Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers."

Even though those same papers tended to be published in less prestigous journals and take longer to garner attention, they ultimately became more influential.

Intellectual innovation, therefore, often comes from remixes of existing knowledge, rather than completely new discoveries.

Until the mid-19th century, the best containers artists had for holding paint were pigs' bladders.

But bladders aren't great at this. They have a tendency to unexpectedly burst, and once they're open, their contents dry out pretty quickly. This makes painting outside of your studio difficult.

Enter John G. Rand, an American artist who invented the tin paint tube. That simple technological innovation helped pave the way for Impressionism, because it allowed painters to complete their work from virtually anywhere and even enabled new paint colors.

Artists soon took advantage of this, capturing the world like never before. Claude Monet apparently got so close to the subject of his 1885 work Waves at the Manneporte, you can find sand embedded in it:

Inventor Danny Hillis famously remarked that "technology is everything that doesn’t work yet." We don't tend to think of a paint tube as technology, because we eventually take innovations like it for granted. (See also: the wheel.)

Technological innovation removes barriers to human expression, enabling new styles and even entire disciplines. Sometimes, all it takes is a paint tube.