Interdisciplinary Design Education Based on Collaboration Between Arts and Engineering Schools

Author(s):  
Soo Yeon Leem ◽  
Sang Won Lee

In this paper, the new graduate course, referred to as “Creation and Innovation”, for interdisciplinary design and innovation is introduced based on the collaboration between arts and engineering. In this course, students having various backgrounds in arts and engineering schools participates and forms several interdisciplinary teams for project-based learning. The systematic methods such as Design Thinking Process and Strategic Foresight and Innovation have been combinatorially adopted for this course. Those methods are human-centered approaches, which allow deep understanding on users’ needs and wants by being empathized with users and their environments. This empathy activity can enable the students to actively consider users’ various aspects, which has been of much significance in the current interdisciplinary design education. It is also shown that the collaboration among the team members with the backgrounds of arts and engineering can be effective to generate more creative and innovative ideas by combining their holistic and analytic views.

Author(s):  
Matt McLain

AbstractDrawing on the work of Lee Shulman, this article reviews literature exploring the concept of signature pedagogies, which are described as having have surface, deep and implicit structures. These structures are complex and changing; concerned with habits of head, hand and heart. Emerging from professional education and now being explored in STEM and Humanities education, they are characteristic forms of teaching and learning that are common across a sector. Common themes emerge from within a range of disciplines including art, built environment, design, music, religious, social work and teacher education. These include the roles of the curriculum, the teacher, the learning environment, as well as capability, uncertainty and the challenges associated with signature pedagogies. Focusing on literature from design education, the paper explores the nature of signature pedagogy in design and technology, as a tool for professional discourse. The conclusions propose a discursive framework for design and technology education in which the structures are tied together by the three fundamental activities of ideating, realising and critiquing; more commonly thought of as designing, making and evaluating. The deep structure being project-based learning, undergirded by the implicit values and attitudes associated with design thinking; including collaboration, creativity, empathy, iteration and problem solving. Design and technology education has something unique to offer the broad and balanced curriculum through its signature pedagogies and the way that knowledge is experienced by learners.


Author(s):  
Anastacia MacAllister ◽  
Eliot Winer ◽  
Tsung-Pin Yeh ◽  
Daniel Seal ◽  
Grant Degenhardt

As markets demand engineered products faster, waiting on the cyclical design processes of the past is not an option. Instead, industry is turning to concurrent design and interdisciplinary teams. When these teams collaborate, engineering CAD tools play a vital role in conceptualizing and validating designs. These tools require significant user investment to master, due to challenging interfaces and an overabundance of features. These challenges often prohibit team members from using these tools for exploring alternatives. This paper presents a method allowing users to interact with a design using intuitive gestures and head tracking, all while keeping the model in a CAD format. Specifically, Siemens’ Teamcenter® Lifecycle Visualization Mockup (Mockup) was used to display the design geometry while modifications were made through a set of gestures captured by a Microsoft Kinect™ in real time. This proof of concept program allowed a user to rotate the scene, activate Mockup’s immersive menu, move the immersive wand, and manipulate the view based on head position. The result is an immersive user-friendly low cost platform for interdisciplinary design review.


Author(s):  
José E. Lugo ◽  
Mari Luz Zapata-Ramos ◽  
Carla P. Puig

Entrepreneurial teams are generally interdisciplinary in nature; they tend to combine business, design, and engineering disciplines/expertise. The effectiveness of interdisciplinary design teams has become more important for both start-ups and companies that want to innovate; however, it is often troublesome to determine the group composition that delivers a good product/business idea. The purpose of this study is to investigate the traits in personalities that are needed in a successful entrepreneurial student design team. A study was conducted in which 40 students were divided into seven groups to deliver a technology-based product using design thinking techniques, and consumer behavior theories and research. The personality for each team member was evaluated utilizing the Big Five Test and analyzed jointly as a team, denoted as Team’s Overall Personality (TOP); and by the variability of their personalities in the group, referred as Team Personality Distribution (TPD). The teams’ performances were accounted, ranking them in Best of Best (BOB) and Worst of Worst (WOW) by taking into consideration their performance in: interview collection, idea generation, prototyping, and final presentation. The results demonstrated that the teams with best performance had high variability in Neuroticism and Extraversion when analyzed by TPD and average personality traits in Extraversion and Agreeableness when analyzed with TOP. Therefore, analysis supported that each member’s personality affects his or her team’s performance. It is recommended that the relationship is further investigated for a better representation of efficient group compositions. Recommendations on how to compose entrepreneurial design teams are provided.


Author(s):  
DEMİR Özümcan ◽  
Pınar KAYGAN

Recently we witness a rising interest in interdisciplinary collaboration in both industrial design and engineering education. Since developing technology and innovation invites more complex design problems that are usually beyond the professional skills and competences of a single person, learning how to work in interdisciplinary teams becomes a central concern within the undergraduate programs of these fields. With the aim of contributing to interdisciplinary design education, this paper explores a four-week extra-curricular education activity called Interdisciplinary Design Studio (IDS) that was carried out at Middle East Technical University. The empirical data comes from the accounts of the students who participated in the IDS, from the Departments of Industrial Design, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Computer Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Business Administration, who came together in six interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative products following the stages of a design process. Drawing on their accounts the paper seeks to answer two questions: First, how and in what ways students learned about other disciplines; and second, to what extent and how these learning experiences shape their approaches towards developing ways to collaborate with people (both tutors and students) from other disciplines.


Author(s):  
John Birch ◽  
Paola Jaramillo ◽  
Karen Wosczyna-Birch ◽  
Ronald Adrezin ◽  
Beth Richards

The Engineering Challenge for the 21st Century Program was initially based on concepts from the Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) model. The TIDEE model was developed in the mid 1990s to focus on continuous improvement of engineering design education. The primary thrust of the TIDEE model focuses on team-based activities that allow students to effectively develop the necessary skills to become qualified, productive, and successful engineers and technologists of the future. The Engineering Challenge Program focuses on project based learning in a team environment and targets two important educational groups: underrepresented students as well as faculty from high schools and community colleges in Connecticut. In order to further develop the students’ interpersonal and organizational skills, the Engineering Challenge Program expands on the TIDEE model through development of technical writing and professional skills including project management, teamwork skills, understanding behavioral diversity using DISC behavioral profiles, and personal accountability. Interdisciplinary teams of high school teachers and college faculty work with a CT-based management consultant group to deliver the program by “teaching teachers” effective methods to assess and coach teamwork in the classroom and labs. The Engineering Challenge Program has impacted over 250 students composed of high school and undergraduate students from community colleges and to a lesser degree four-year universities. By targeting underrepresented student participants, the program has been effective in engaging its participants in pursuing education and careers in STEM-related disciplines. Approximately 35% of the participants have been females and 53% of the participants’ non-Caucasian.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 208
Author(s):  
Hernan Casakin ◽  
Vishal Singh

Design and design thinking are increasingly being taught across several disciplines—ranging from arts, architecture, and technology and engineering to business schools—where expertise plays a central role. A substantial corpus of literature on research in regard to design expert and design expertise has accumulated in the last decades. However, in spite of its importance for design and design education, the topic has remained largely unframed. A major goal of this study was to carry out an assessment of literature through leading interdisciplinary design journals in order to identify main topics and categorize them into thematic patterns concerned with expertise in design. A structured assessment approach based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used over 861 abstracts. The emerging thematic patterns associated with design expertise allowed a categorization at different levels of detail, which included 80, 50, 20, and 12 factors analyses, respectively. The major contribution of the study was to offer a structured assessment of key design literature that enabled to gain a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the thematic patterns in the discussion on design expertise. Implications of the identified key factors for design education are discussed.


2022 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Rose Skywark ◽  
Elizabeth Chen ◽  
Vichitra Jagannathan

Background: Our instructional team at the The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led an innovative project that used IDEO.org's design thinking process to create a brand-new interdisciplinary graduate course, housed in the school of public health, titled Design Thinking for the Public Good. We offer our course design process as a case study of the use of design thinking for course design.Methods: We collected data and generated insights through a variety of inspiration, ideation, and implementation design thinking methods alongside members of our three stakeholder groups: (2) faculty who teach or have taught courses related to design thinking at our higher education institution; (2) design thinking experts at ours and other institutions and outside of higher education; and (3) graduate students at our institution.Results: We learned that interdisciplinary design thinking courses should include growth-oriented reflection, explicit group work skills, and content with a real-world application.Conclusions: Our course design process and findings can be replicated to design courses regardless of area of study, level, or format.


Cubic Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 20-31
Author(s):  
Bo Allesøe Christensen ◽  
Peter Vistisen ◽  
Thessa Jensen

This paper provides an argument against understanding risk-taking in design education as something ideally in need of only being calculable and formalisable. Using the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s theory on risktaking combined with the current discourse on design thinking, together with an analysis of a three week-long interdisciplinary design workshop, we analyse and discuss how risk-taking - as a general concept - in design education is an inherent element of the education itself. We argue, however, non-calculable risks, like human-centred design concerns, like desirability of use, ethics of technology, are an equally important part of a modern-day educational skillset as calculable risks. The aim is arguing for the prospect of interdisciplinary design-based education models as one way of embracing the non-calculable elements of a problem space.


Author(s):  
José E. Lugo ◽  
Mari Luz Zapata-Ramos ◽  
Manuel J. Perez-Vargas

There is a need to improve the innovation and entrepreneurship capacity of engineering design students before graduation, as innovation and entrepreneurship are drivers of economic growth. This paper presents the alignment of existing courses within a university system, mainly Design Thinking (Engineering) and Consumer Behavior (Marketing), with the purpose of developing technology-based entrepreneurship efforts that directly impact a society in need of economic development. Students from each course were presented with six current problems being faced by society, for them to work on in groups. The experience of having interdisciplinary teams working together to achieve a common goal is documented. Also, in order to measure the impact of the courses on the students, a survey of innovation self-efficacy was given to the students at the beginning and at the end of each semester. The results and implications for engineering design education are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 60-77
Author(s):  
E. V. Vasilieva ◽  
T. V. Gaibova

This paper describes the method of project risk analysis based on design thinking and explores the possibility of its application for industrial investment projects. Traditional and suggested approaches to project risk management have been compared. Several risk analysis artifacts have been added to the standard list of artifacts. An iterative procedure for the formation of risk analysis artifacts has been developed, with the purpose of integrating the risk management process into strategic and prompt decision-making during project management. A list of tools at each stage of design thinking for risk management within the framework of real investment projects has been proposed. The suggested technology helps to determine project objectives and content and adapt them in regards to possible; as well as to implement measures aimed at reducing these risks, to increase productivity of the existing risk assessment and risk management tools, to organize effective cooperation between project team members, and to promote accumulation of knowledge about the project during its development and implementation.The authors declare no conflict of interest.


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