Navigating the Barriers to Interdisciplinary Design Education: Lessons Learned From the NSF Design Workshop Series

Abstract

Evidence suggests that transformational innovation occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines rather than isolated within them. Design—being both pervasive and inherently interdisciplinary—has the power to transcend many disciplines and help break down the departmental “silos” that hinder such collaborative efforts. Many universities are now struggling to embrace the curricular innovations that are necessary to achieve and sustain interdisciplinary education. Given the already packed undergraduate engineering curricula, several universities have started to offer new design programs that span several disciplines at the masters and doctoral levels. In this paper, we examine the five interdisciplinary graduate design programs offered by three different universities—University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and Stanford University—that hosted the NSF Design Workshop Series in 2008–2009. Collectively, these programs represent “solutions” that span a variety of graduate degree offerings that are available and provide examples of ways to successfully navigate the barriers and hurdles to interdisciplinary design education. A recap of the NSF Design Workshop Series is also provided along with recommendations from the workshops to foster discussion and provide directions for future work.

Türkiye’de Endüstriyel Tasarım Stüdyo Eğitiminde Konu ve Yaklaşım Odaklı Değişimler

“…On the contrary, the applications of interdisciplinary approaches in design studios can be regarded as initial attempts, which are mostly practiced in elective design studio courses instead of compulsory ones. Because of the challenges educators encounter in conducting interdisciplinary design projects corresponding to Simpson's (2010) four barriers as "resource issues, faculty issues, students issues, and pedagogy/curriculum issues", they have got to approach distance to the projects in collaboration with other departments. But at the same time, most of the scholars believe that more interdisciplinary projects should be implemented to the design studios to educate designers of the twenty-first century acknowledging the importance of interdisciplinary team experience.…”

Anatomy of Scholarly Collaboration in Engineering Education: A Big‐Data Bibliometric Analysis

“…Perhaps even establishing regional centers of excellence – tied in with national organizations such as ASEE or IEEE – would provide a framework for better collaboration. In fact, the National Science Foundation's Design Workshop series (Simpson et al, ), Rigorous Research in Engineering Education workshops (Streveler, Smith, & Miller, ), and National Effective Teaching Institute (Felder & Brent, ) all aim to promote collaboration among EER scholars with similar interests. On the other hand, the fact that between‐state collaboration is less common suggests a great need for transformation in the way scholars communicate.…”

Collaborative research in art, design and new media - challenges and opportunities

“…Design -being both pervasive and inherently interdisciplinary -has the power to transcend many disciplines and help break down the departmental "silos" that hinder such collaborative efforts. Many universities are now struggling to embrace the curricular innovations that are necessary to achieve and sustain interdisciplinary education" [7].…”