Introduction: Research Challenges

Location: NSF CMMI Grantees Conference, Honolulu, HI

Organizers: Matt Parkinson, Tim Simpson, Dave Celento, Sam Hunter

This workshop in the NSF Workshop Series, Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline, was held in conjunction with the NSF CMMI Grantees Conference in Honolulu, Hawai'i on June 22, 2009. This workshop focused on the challenges associated with research in such an interdisciplinary area.

Workshop Summary

Creativity and innovation in our approaches to design have never been more important. Engaging non-engineering disciplines such as industrial design, architecture, business, and the information sciences leverages their perspectives and design capabilities but requires new skills of everyone involved in order to be effective. Interdisciplinary graduate design programs provide one opportunity for bringing these faculty and students together. A series of workshops, funded by the NSF, has provided an opportunity to benchmark several of these programs and discuss obstacles to their creation and success. We have also been discussing the "ideal" interdisciplinary graduate design program as well as several interdisciplinary research questions that we face as designers. This workshop, which was held at the NSF CMMI Grantees Conference on Monday, June 22, provided an industry perspective on these issues and the design challenges industry faces in today's global - and economically turbulent - marketplace. This includes relevant research questions as well as the opportunity to discuss the many facets of these challenges in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary setting. As one outcome from the workshop, participant teams explored a research question that could then be developed into a competitive research proposal for NSF.

Acknowledgements: Funding for the workshop is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. CMMI-0847181. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.