Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline
an NSF-sponsored workshop series
Design is increasingly seen as an integrative discipline in engineering and many other fields, while designing is seen as a multi- or inter-disciplinary activity. In engineering undergraduate curricula, due in large part to ABET requirements, one or more courses with a design "experience" (e.g., a capstone design course) are required. In graduate curricula this approach is less successful since structuring design courses to be instruction in a discipline rather than a guided "experience" is a major challenge. Following the successful NSF workshop on interdisciplinary graduate design education, we initiated a Design Workshop Series with the objective to capture, codify, share, and propagate instructional experiences and philosophies across the nation. The Design Workshop Series spanned one year and focused on interdisciplinary graduate design education. Hosting responsibilities rotated between the three partner universities (Michigan, Northwestern, and Stanford). Each workshop was two days in length. On the afternoon of Day 1, the host university provided an overview of its design program and facilities. Day 2 was an open discussion on specific graduate-design instructional topics chosen to match the strengths and experience of the host program. A fourth workshop was organized by Penn State and held in conjunction with the 2009 NSF CMII Grantees Conference. All of these workshop activities were open to anyone to attend, and NSF funding was used to provide travel support for interested participants with the goal of broadening involvement in the larger design community (e.g., engineering, architecture, industrial design, psychology, business). The outcomes are a documented characterization of design as a discipline that can be taught, along with curricular templates that can be adapted for local use by institutions nationally. The long-term outcome will be the training of design instructors who approach design - research and teaching - as a discipline.
Download the final report
Download the presentation given at the 2010 Mechanical Engineering Education Conference
Organized by Penn State
Location: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Organizers: William Braham, Franca Trubiano, Tim Simpson, Dan Willis
Location: NSF CMMI Grantees Conference, Honolulu, HI
Organizers: Matt Parkinson, Tim Simpson, Dave Celento, Sam Hunter
Location: ASME DETC 2008, New York, NY
Location: The National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA
Organizers: Tim Simpson, Matt Parkinson, Cari Bryant Arnold, Sam Hunter, Dave Celento
Organized by Partner Institutions
Location: Stanford University/d.school & Center for Design Research, Palo Alto, CA
Organizers: Larry Leifer, Bernard Roth
For more information: http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/nsfdesignworkshop/
Location: Northwestern University/Segal Design Institute, Evanston, IL
Organizers: Wei Chen, Ed Colgate, Don Norman, Ann McKenna
For more information: http://www.segal.northwestern.edu/designworkshop/
Location: University of Michigan/Design Science Program, Ann Arbor, MI
Organizers: Panos Papalambros, Richard Gonzalez, Shanna Daly
For more information: http://designscience.umich.edu/designworkshop.html
