ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations to develop innovative ideas for coastal resiliency. Traditional design approaches need the contributions of other disciplines to craft more comprehensive, systems-based solutions for coastal resiliency. Interdisciplinary teamwork can lead to systems-based solutions, which are appropriate to the scale of the challenge. Interdisciplinary collaboration helps avoid common traps or errors by promoting the questioning of ideas that are accepted as standard practice in other disciplines. Three of the most significant challenges in interdisciplinary collaboration are teamwork and communication, team management, and institutional structures. The communication challenges are often a result of team members speaking different disciplinary languages. The best team members are intensely curious, open to new ideas, and have strong synthetic and analytic abilities. The promise of collaboration promoted in literature is confirmed by experiences in interdisciplinary design teams tackling coastal resilience challenges.
