Towards a Collaborative Ergonomics: From Strangers to Symbiotic Community through Boundary Traversal in Performance

Abstract

In the globalized twenty-first century, the relevance of intercultural performance is to forge supporting infrastructures between collaborators of divergent sociocultural backgrounds and disciplinary training. Fostering such infrastructures is vital for reconfiguring existing social relations and redistributing resources in the face of increasing sociocultural asymmetry. However, I argue that transforming collaborating ‘strangers’ into interdependent components of a sustainable symbiotic community necessitates the implementation of a collaborative ergonomics. It is an ergonomics concerned with the efficiency and efficacy of collaboration that actively seeks to traverse boundaries and borders. Linguistic translation, lexical translation and the transference and co-production of embodied knowledge are the crucial steps for effecting a collaborative ergonomics. Signs of an emerging symbiosis include the increasingly collaborative relationships between the collaborators and the transformation of embodied practices into highly reflexive and rigorous praxis.