Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline

Fall 2008 – Fall 2009

Statement of Objectives and Outcomes for the 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. Issues arise in terms of both course content and instructor training due to the aforementioned multi- or inter-disciplinary nature of design activities. Nevertheless, many schools have started to offer entire design curricula at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. Courses tend to be oriented towards a narrow topic in design, following the instructors’ research interests whereas a successful graduate program in design would naturally follow a deeper appreciation of design as a discipline rather than as a mere collection of disciplines.

Following the recent successful NSF workshop on interdisciplinary graduate design education, we proposed a Design Workshop Series with the objective to capture, codify, share, and propagate instructional experiences and philosophies across the nation. The outcomes will be 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.

The proposed Design Workshop Series will span one year and focus on interdisciplinary graduate design education. Hosting responsibilities will rotate between the partner universities as shown in Table 1. Three on-site workshops will be offered. Each workshop will be two days in length. On the afternoon of Day 1, the host university will provide an overview of its design program and facilities. Day 2 will be an open discussion on specific graduate-design instructional topics chosen to match the strengths and experience of the host university. These activities will be open to anyone to attend, and NSF funding will be 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). On the morning of Day 1, prior to the start of the broader workshop, invited participants will discuss specific topics shown in Table 1 – these topics were among the common themes that arose at the aforementioned NSF Design Workshop help in May 2008. Attendance will be limited to ensure productive, convergent discussions. A summary of the activities will be presented on Day 2.

Table 1. Design Workshop Series: Schedule, Discussion Topics, and Weblinks

In addition to the rotating workshops, a special workshop will be organized and conducted by faculty from Penn State University at the NSF CMII Grantees Conference in June 2009. This half-day event will be open to all conference attendees – along with participants from the other workshops and larger design community – and will provide an update and summary of prior activities, including the May 2008 NSF Design Workshop, the follow-up panel discussion at the 2008 ASME DETC, and the first two workshops. This workshop will also provide a moderated forum to discuss future directions and programmatic developments for interdisciplinary graduate design programs while emphasizing design research discussions within the context of cognizant NSF programs and relevant solicitations (e.g., Engineering Design, CreativeIT, IGERT).

Motivation for the Design Workshop Series

The need to improve the creativity and innovativeness of our graduates has become a matter of national importance. Increasing innovative potential not only improves the likelihood of creating a competitive economic advantage at local and global levels, but also increases the probability of producing social innovations (e.g., medical advances, alternative fuels, information technology and computer access), which stand as substantive and necessary contributions to society as a whole (McNeil, 2007) in addition to being economically attractive. A recent report by the Council of Graduate Schools (2007) on American competitiveness and innovation states: “The United States must increase the number of graduate education programs that reflect the interdisciplinary dynamism characteristic of most innovative research centers” (p. 19). They expressly call for an increase in interdisciplinary training, stating: “interdisciplinary research preparation and education are central to future competitiveness, because knowledge creation and innovation frequently occur at the interface of disciplines” (p. 18). They view interdisciplinary training as a central factor in expanding and sustaining an American competitive advantage, and the benefits of such training have been corroborated in many empirical studies (e.g., Alves et al., 2007). The National Innovation Initiative Report (2004) echoed the importance of such training, asserting that successful innovation is inherently multidisciplinary—requiring input from individuals with varying backgrounds, talents, and areas of expertise. Innovation, the report states, primarily occurs at the intersection of multiple disciplines rather than isolated within them. The criticality of innovation to American success is also echoed in a 2008 report to the Secretary of Commerce by the Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21 st Century Economy, which noted the rapidly closing gap between the United States and the rest of the world. As the world flattens, developing design as a broadly recognized and practiced instructional discipline is essential for maintaining leadership in innovation.

Despite the imperative for training an innovative workforce, there remains a lack of clarity about how to best prepare students for tackling the complex design problems of the future, some that we know about and others yet to be discovered. Moreover, it remains unclear how we can best overcome the departmental “silos” that have arisen in academia to prepare students for the unique multidisciplinary challenges that they will face. With the exception of individual site visits and informal discussions, we are unaware of any formal meetings, panels, or workshops (other than the preliminary workshop that we held in May 2008 at NSF) that have been held or conducted among faculty in these new interdisciplinary graduate design programs. Through this series of workshops, we will provide a forum wherein the design community can discuss the challenges, successes, practices, and future directions of these programs to gain insight into how to construct, grow, and sustain interdisciplinary graduate programs that prepare students for successful design innovation.

Workshop Organizing Committee and Steering Committee

Each partner school will form its own Workshop Organizing Committee, which will be responsible for the local preparations when they are hosting the workshop. Meanwhile, the PIs and co-PIs on this proposal will constitute the Workshop Steering Committee, which will oversee and coordinate the activities within the Design Workshop Series.

Dates, Locations, and Advertising

The Design Workshop Series will rotate among the partner universities as indicated in Table 1. Each university will be responsible for identifying the specific location at which the two-day workshop will be held along with the dates for the workshop, typically at or near the respective campuses. These dates should be set in advance to provide ample time to advertise the workshop and allow people to fit it into their schedules. The organizing team at each partner university will also be responsible for securing lodging and hotel accommodations for 40-50 attendees during the workshop. Once the dates and schedule have been set, we will collectively advertise the workshop to the larger design community, including sending email announcements about the workshop to the ASME Design Automation Community, the ASME Design Theory & Methodology community, ASEE Design Education Track, as well as other design societies such as the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), etc.

Workshop Agenda

While specific workshop schedules will vary slightly, we have established the following agenda to serve as a guideline for the workshops that will be conducted at each partner university:

• Day 1 morning (invited participants): focused discussion on design education topic (see Table 1)
• Day 1 afternoon (all): program overview; meet with faculty, students, and staff; tour labs and facilities; dinner
• Day 2 (all): recap previous discussions, summary of Day 1 discussion; moderated discussion of design topics

We anticipate that the Day 1 schedule will be a full day in length. The Day 2 discussion activity will last approximately half-day, allowing people to leave as necessary in the afternoon.

Proposed Budget

The Design Workshop Series will be financed through a combination of government, industry, and academia support. We are requesting $100,000 from the National Science Foundation to help support the actual workshop costs – this funding will be split between the partner universities and used to support travel costs for participants from non-partner institutions. Additional support for the workshops and travel will be sought from the partner universities and industry. Assuming an even distribution of financing, each university is expected to contribute approximately $10,000 through either their own match or industry support in order to allow 3-4 members from their university attend each workshop. Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact of the Workshop

The objective of the Design Workshop Series is to capture, codify, share, and propagate instructional experiences and philosophies of interdisciplinary design education across the nation. The outcomes will be 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.

The intellectual merit of this workshop series lies in the knowledge and new insights that will be gained by collectively sharing the best practices of emerging and established interdisciplinary graduate programs in design – those that have successfully managed to navigate the disciplinary and institutional boundaries that have hindered many other attempts.

The broader impacts of the workshop will be to (1) strengthen existing and emerging graduate design programs across the country, thus improving our innovation output at the workforce level and increasing our competitive economic advantage; (2) establish a repository of knowledge that can provide substantive guidance for other design programs to follow; (3) provide a moderated forum for the design community to discuss the challenges, successes, practices, and future directions of these programs, leading to broader exposure at professional society meetings and archival publications.

For more details, see: http://www.design.psu.edu/NSF/workshop_May08/

Report on the NSF Workshop on Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Programs, 29-30 May 2008, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA USA