Driving Innovation through Design – Engineering in the 21st Century
April 15-16, 2010, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
New: Workshop Report
Pictures from Driving Innovation through Design
We live in a world where knowledge and information, products and services, education, medicine, and entertainment all cut across traditional boundaries, whether they are of disciplines, philosophies, politics, or geography. Real problems are not confined to the engineering disciplines or defined solely by technical concerns. They involve humans, groups, organizations, and societies, and they impact law and business, raising new issues related to ethical and environmental concerns that call for world-wide collaborations. How should universities, in their teaching and their research, respond to this ever-more complex and interconnected world?
Universities provide a thousand-year-old tradition of deep, intellectual depth and creativity, but with the passage of time, each of the disciplines within a university has become a cylinder of excellence, with little cross-connection. From time to time, new cylinders form (e.g., departments of bioengineering are commonplace today, but were nonexistent forty years ago), and some fade away, but little is done to ensure that cross-connection is a core part of the university mission.
We suggest that Design is both a path to transdisciplinary cross-connection and an intellectual pursuit worthy of study within the Academy. Design is rooted in understanding and meeting the needs of humanity, which are necessarily complex and interconnected. Design – being pervasive and inherently interdisciplinary – can be a common way of thinking and a common language to bridge the barriers across traditional boundaries in driving the successful innovation processes. The purpose of this workshop is to hold a substantive discussion of the role that Design may have in helping universities achieve their mission in the twenty-first century and to discuss plans to achieve this objective in both the education and research domains.
The one and an half day workshop will bring together a group of university administrators (Deans/department heads), faculty, researchers, and industrial practitioners across a variety of disciplines such as engineering, business, economics, journalism, arts and architecture, education and social policy. The goals are (1) to reach a deeper understanding of the transdisciplinary issues faced in university and the world of design, (2) to foster interactions and facilitate dialogue by collectively sharing experiences of creating, cultivating, and sustaining successful interdisciplinary research and education programs, and (3) to seek synergistic research and educational efforts towards establishing Design as a path towards innovation and transdisciplinary cross-connection.
Throughout the workshop we hope to introduce new ideas and perspectives and forge new connections. We will begin on the morning of April 15th with four brief presentations that address the need for innovation in the years ahead. Perspectives will cover a wide range: from the macroeconomic to the pedagogical. This will be followed by an interactive panel discussion. The afternoon will feature another four presentations that present novel approaches to research and education, featuring design as a pathway to innovation and transdisciplinary cross-connection. This will be followed by the "Panel of Deans" during which the leaders of several leading engineering schools respond to the day's presentations and share their own visions. Throughout the day, ample time will be devoted to informal exchanges. Prior to dinner, all attendees will be invited to join Design:Chicago (see 2010 Design Chicago Webcast), which is an annual event hosted by Master in Product Development (MPD) program, the Northwestern University School of Engineering and the Segal Design Institute that highlights Chicago's vibrant design community. As a final activity in the morning of April 16th, we will discuss how we can proactively work together to accomplish our education and research objectives.
Participation in the workshop will be limited to 50 attendees and will require submission of the online application and commitment to attending and actively participating in the entire workshop. Selection will be based on having a broad, diverse group that best addresses the theme of this workshop. Attendees will be eligible for travel support, hotel accommodation, and flight (or other means of transportation). Priority for attendance will be given to applications received prior to February 12, 2010. Selected attendees will be informed prior to February 26, 2010.
