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The term 'transdisciplinary' is receiving increased attention within engineering academic and research funding communities. We survey authors of papers presented at the 27 th ISTE International Transdisciplinary Engineering Conference (TE2020) to answer two research questions: 1) How do authors define transdisciplinary engineering? 2) What do authors perceive differentiates interdisciplinary engineering research from transdisciplinary engineering research? Responses from thirty-four participants (50%), are qualitatively analysed. Results show that for the three characteristics commonly used in characterisations of transdisciplinarity (goal, collaboration and integration), multiple concepts exist. These range from generic expressions which overlap with how interdisciplinarity is defined within the general literature, to stronger, more definitive expressions. Conclusions find that rather than a single definition a transdisciplinary landscape exists. To enable users to define where they sit in the transdisciplinary landscape, we create a framework enabling users to map their position under the three key characteristics of goal, collaboration and integration.

This paper presents our findings from thirteen industrial interviews, to investigate the significance of transdisciplinarity (TD) in an industrial context. Thus to gain insight into the resilience of industrial manufacturing in rapidly changing environments and establish what enabling or disabling practices may currently exist. The interviews were conducted as an initial part of a wider case study approach being undertaken by the TREND research team and were semi-structured in format. We present the background and research questions being addressed and outline our exploratory research approach. The analysis of interview transcriptions is provided answering our research questions and identifying any emerging themes. Of the industry interviews, only five interviewees had heard of the term TD, the definition of TD varied between companies and did not align with the primordial system of Jantsch’s work. A number of focal enabling and disabling industrial themes emerge from the interviews and related discourse such as the positive and negative human contribution(s) and growing global teams involved in manufacture. For industry to be resilient and meet rapid technological and societal change, these themes should be core for manufacturing solutions. Secondary studies should investigate literature and collaborate with engineering industries to test any potential TD interventions.

‘Industry 5.0’ has been used as a term to describe alternative visions of the future of industry. Recently, a European Union Research and Innovation Policy Brief used the label Industry 5.0 to define a vision which is not driven by a new technology, but by a changed perception of value founded on human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE) seeks to integrate knowledge and understanding to reduce the negative effect of engineering innovation on the environment and society, thus there likely exists a natural synergy between Industry 5.0 and TE. Consequently, in this paper we seek to understand what the opportunities and challenges of the emergence of Industry 5.0 might be for the field of TE now and in the future. A workshop involving multidisciplinary experts was convened to brainstorm and then explore perceptions. Opportunities include new research areas and potential access to funding. Challenges center on the extent that TE could, or should, align itself with Industry 5.0, and the lack of consensus around definitions of TE. Conclusions find that to attract funding, the community should clearly articulate how TE differs from complimentary and overlapping fields such as interdisciplinarity and systems engineering.

Based on the appearance of the term within the academic literature, it would appear that transdisciplinarity (TD) approaches are receiving increased research attention. However, the literature suggests a lack of consensus over how TD is defined and classified. This could give rise to inconsistency and papers that claim to be TD which are not, and alternatively papers that fail to mention TD but which might be classified as such. This is significant and creates a challenge in identifying the true level of TD research. This work contributes towards understanding the state of TD within engineering. Explicitly, we address the research question: Is the engineering academic literature claiming to be TD, actually TD? Within this study we operationalise the work of Jantsch and use this as a means to classify the disciplinarity of 177 engineering journal papers which reference TD within their abstract. The results show only 24% to be TD. The majority (64%) are classified as interdisciplinary. Conclusions find that to improve consistency, a clear definition and rules for differentiation between TD and ID research are required. Future work calls for: (1) comparative studies which apply different methods for assessing disciplinarity across the dataset used within this study and which use the method employed within this study across different fields. (2) Research to analyse whether TD working is being undertaken in engineering without it being referenced within the paper.