Richard Gonzalez
Center Director, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research
Director, BioSocial Methods Collaborative, RCGD
Amos N Tversky Collegiate Professor, Psychology and Statistics, LSA
Professor of Marketing, Stephen M Ross School of Business
Professor of Integrative Systems and Design, College of Engineering
| E-mail: | Email Richard Gonzalez |
| Address: | Research Center for Group Dynamics Institute for Social Research University of Michigan 426 Thompson Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 |
| Phone: | 734-647-6785 |
Setting up an interdisciplinary design education program
This reports emerged from a series of workshops funded by NSF on different approaches to interdisciplinary design education. It provides a comparison of several degree programs.
Simpson, T., Parkinson, M., Celento, D., Chen, W., McKenna, A., Colgate, E., Norman, D., Papalambros, P., Gonzalez, R., Roth, B., & Leifer, L. (2010). Navigating the barriers to interdisciplinary design education: Lessons learned from the NSF Design Workshop Series. International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Montreal, Canada. PDF
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.
