FOCUS ON DESIGN
interdisciplinary by design
Who will create the
products of our future? Everyone from the engineer to the psychologist.
This group met to ask how that can be done.
by Tim Simpson, Russell Barton, and Dave Celento
The list goes on and on, and the questions are as diverse as the products that surround us. It is only recently, however, that formal research programs—graduate and undergraduate —have started to emerge in the United States to study these questions in detail and with an interdisciplinary focus, by combining, for example, engineering design with marketing and psychology; architecture with design computation, engineering analysis, and emerging materials; or science, technology, and society (STS) with engineering and industrial design.
The seed for many of these emerging interdisciplinary programs in design is not new either—cutting edge research and advancements invariably lie at the boundaries of departmental silos, but there seems to be a greater sense of urgency than ever before, due in large part to increasing competition in product design and innovation from around the globe. This competition has generated a desire for much broader design skills in the workplace, requiring academic institutions to respond.
The need to improve the creativity and innovativeness of our graduates is becoming a matter of national importance in the United States, as echoed in numerous reports, including the 2007 report from the Council of Graduate Schools, which states on page 19, “The United States must increase the number of graduate education programs that reflect the interdisciplinary dynamism characteristic of most innovative research centers.”
Despite the imperative for training an innovative workforce, many wonder: What is the best way to prepare our students for tackling the complex design problems of the future, some that we know about and others that are yet to be discovered? While we argue about who owns design or how it should be taught, most agree that design is at the heart of innovation. Increasing innovative potential through design not only improves the likelihood of creating a competitive economic advantage, but also increases the probability of producing advances in areas such as medicine, alternative fuels, and information technology for developing countries, innovations which, in addition to being economically viable, stand as substantive and necessary contributions to society as a whole.
With these thoughts in mind, we gathered 40 faculty from engineering, architecture, industrial design, business, psychology, computer science, education, and STS programs along with a half-dozen industry practitioners at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., in May 2008 to discuss interdisciplinary design.
Funded through the office of Judy Vance, program director of engineering design at NSF, the workshop provided a forum to examine how existing interdisciplinary design programs are transforming education not only in engineering but also in architecture, industrial design, and related fields. This background provided a foundation to think about how to further develop the discipline of interdisciplinary design.
While the focus was primarily on graduate programs, notable undergraduate programs that were planning to expand to the graduate level were also presented. In total, nine programs were showcased, and three panel discussions were held, focusing on the benefits and opportunities of interdisciplinary design, industry’s desire for and proactive integration of designers with broad skills, and the hurdles imposed by traditional academic structures and processes for such cross-cutting initiatives.
‘SCHOOLS HAVE MORE BARRIERS’
The workshops attracted participants from numerous fields with a shared
passion for design. The group engaged in a series of productive discussions
about the nature of design, the role of design research, and the interdisciplinary
barriers that many of us face.
Schools are taking steps to overcome some of the obstacles to interdepartmental
collaboration. The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, for instance,
is developing an interdisciplinary graduate design program. Among those
working to create it is Chris Hosmer, who is on sabbatical from his job
as design strategist with Continuum, the international design consultancy
that operates from Boston, Mass.; Milan, Italy, and Seoul, Korea.
According to Hosmer, “Schools have more barriers than most of the
companies that I’ve worked for.”
David Goldberg, the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, noted that organizational
resistances to interdisciplinary programs lie not only in the departments
(organizational structures of people that define fields) but also in the
degrees conferred (reward structures that control the dissemination of
knowledge and the assessment of mastery), as well as in the “digs”
(location of resources).
While hurdles will always exist, successful programs have found ways to
lower these barriers. The iFoundry is a recently approved think-tank for
piloting curriculum change within the College of Engineering at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is just getting started, and will
begin its first course work this fall. Goldberg calls it an interdepartmental
curriculum incubator. It involves the departments in the College of Engineering
and has ties to faculty in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The
iFoundry Web site is http://www.illigal.uiuc.edu/web/ifoundry.
John Nastasi, a practicing architect and director of the Product-Architecture
Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology, offered a view into a hybrid educational/practical
model where “design collaboration plays a critical role driving
the integration of knowledge and nascent methodologies into new modes
of practice.”
The product-architecture program at Stevens has successfully integrated
architecture, engineering, computation, and product development, attracting
students with wide ranging interests and diverse backgrounds in architecture,
visual arts, industrial design, mathematics, computer science, and mechanical,
aerospace, and biomedical engineering. By focusing on the product or system
being designed, the program is “dissolving boundaries in design
education” and launching students “along trajectories of design
leadership and social entrepreneurialism.” As a testament to their
success, every student in the program receives financial support through
industry partnerships. “NBA games would be boring if the point guards,
centers, and forwards all hung out separately,” Nastasi said. “The
real fun lies in how the game is played by the team. The same goes for
design.”
According to the lab’s Web site, “The program will explore
intense and creative collaborations between designers, engineers, scientists,
and manufacturers.”
Connections like that may address some of the concerns of Keith Zobott,
a corporate director of Honeywell International. His recommendation to
the workshop was: “Focus on the product lifecycle in your programs,
all the way from communicating with your customers, getting clear needs
defined, out into operations and manufacturing.”
Alison McKay, professor of design systems in the School of Mechanical
Engineering at the University of Leeds in England, brought an international
perspective to the workshop. The product design program at Leeds was developed
to “respond to what we saw as an industrial demand for graduates
with a unique educational experience that blended creativity, innovation
and technology,” McKay said.
Following the design research methodologies described by C. Frayling (specifically,
1993/4, “Research in Art and Design,” Royal College of
Art Research Papers, 1(1), pp. 1-5), the students perform research
through design, into design, and for design.
Their experience includes working on a global product design team in conjunction
with students around the world, including the InnovationSpace program
at the Arizona State University.
According to Mark Henderson, professor of engineering at ASU’s Polytechnic
Campus, InnovationSpace provides “a transdisciplinary education
and research lab to teach students how to develop products that create
market value while serving real individual and societal needs and minimizing
impacts on the environment.” A recent outgrowth of the program has
been Global Resolve, where ASU and Leeds have partnered with Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology in Ghana to create multinational
teams to work on multidisciplinary projects for developing countries.
‘T-SHAPED PEOPLE’
As globalization moves engineering, business, and design closer together,
many argued that interdisciplinary graduate design programs are the future
for the U.S. to maintain its position in product leadership. As Spencer
Magleby, associate dean and professor of mechanical engineering at Brigham
Young University, noted early in the workshop, “Undergraduate programs
are full. Much of this will need to occur at the graduate level.”
Much of the ensuing discussion focused on creating “T-shaped people,”
as advocated by Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, a world-renowned
design firm headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. As reflected in this model,
designers should be deep in one disciplinary area (e.g., industrial design
or mechanical engineering), but with broad knowledge of all aspects of
design activity.
Many workshop participants felt that the undergraduate degree provides
the stem of the T, while a graduate degree in interdisciplinary design
provides the broad exposure to all aspects of design to form the top of
the T—the assumption being that students need to be grounded in
a specific discipline before they can become interdisciplinary. Others
thought that the undergraduate degree might, in fact, be the breadth,
and that a deep knowledge of the design discipline at the graduate level
might make the stem. This issue remains unresolved and is worthy of further
exploration.
Throughout the workshop, industry practitioners from companies both small
and large encouraged faculty to focus on the designer that comes from
these programs: Is the goal to create “design-sensitive engineers”
or “engineering-conversant designers” or “design leaders”
or “entrepreneurs” or some new breed of designer? What should
their role in an organization be? Once the goal is identified, the direction
that the graduate programs should take will be clearer, easier to assess,
and leading to consensus about degrees to be offered and organizational
structure.
One of the industry participants, Chris Kasabach, co-founder of BodyMedia
Inc., was clear on the abilities of people whom the company wants to hire.
“We need designers who can convince the strategy team to put a solution
on the roadmap and then shepherd the idea through development,”
Kasabach said.
There was considerable discussion about the type of degree best suited
for such individuals. Of the programs discussed at the workshop, degrees
ranged from B.S., B.A., and B.F.A. (Bachelor of Fine Arts), to M.S., M.F.A.,
M.M.M. (Master of Manufacturing Management), and M.P.D. (Master of Product
Development) in design and design-related fields. The newest addition
is a Ph.D. in Design Science at the University of Michigan. When explaining
the program, Panos Y. Papalambros, the Donald C. Graham Professor of Engineering,
said: “Traditional sciences study the world as we found it. Design
science studies the world as we make it!”
Even with the range of degrees, Spencer Magleby of Brigham Young University,
commented that, “We need better ways to appreciate design as an
academic product.”
Don Norman, the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Senior Professor in
Design and co-director of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University,
said that the low prestige of design at universities—like many companies—arises
primarily from their reward structures, which assign merit based on the
ability to bring in grant money, publish research findings in peer-reviewed
journals, or to achieve a financial target. Since designers tend to be
generalists, the traditional academic reward structure fails to recognize
successes for those having a very broad (but shallow) base of knowledge
rather than becoming an in-depth expert in a particular field.
The disciplinary breadth (vs. depth) of the design function is often underappreciated
in corporate settings as well. For companies focused on traditional “stage/gate”
processes, the reward structure can often mean that deliberative design
decisions made early in the process may initially cause budgets and deadlines
to be overshot but later result in significant savings in time and money
during manufacturing or increased sales due to product desirability. However,
protracted design efforts are often not recognized as beneficial or rewarded,
and may instead be punished.
In terms of valuing design, Dean Nieusma, assistant professor of science,
technology, and society at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stressed
the importance of recognizing and understanding how power is manifested
through disciplinarity when planning interdisciplinary endeavors. Since
different knowledge domains grant different levels of authority to the
various approaches to design, we must recognize and confront problems
that can arise when striving for equal partnerships with disciplines where
design is more marginalized (i.e., has less authority). Not surprisingly,
everyone was quickly able to cite examples of programs with “lower
status” at their respective universities where this was indeed the
case.
THE NEXT STEPS
We are making plans for a Design Workshop Series that will occur in the
coming year, with different universities taking turns organizing and hosting
workshop. Thus far, faculty involved with the graduate design programs
at the University of Michigan (fall 2008), Northwestern University (spring
2009), and Stanford University (summer 2009) plan to participate. NSF
has again agreed to help support the effort.
The purpose of the Design Workshop Series is twofold: two-fold: (1) to
explore design as an instructional discipline by investigating existing
programs while shaping emerging ones, and (2) to broaden and focus the
discussions while involving the larger design community. Our goal: further
legitimize the art and science of design. All are welcome. We hope you
will join us.
|
To
Learn More The workshop was funded by NSF Grant No. CMMI-0829557. 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. Innovative design to
benefit developing countries is the subject of an article, “Design
that Solves Problems for the World’s Poor,” by D. G.
McNeil Jr. in The New York Times, May 29, 2007. It is available
online: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/ |
|
The
Same Three Words
“It’s the
same three words, but each representation connotes something very
different,” Henderson said. |
Tim Simpson is professor of mechanical and
industrial engineering at Pennsylvania State University and director of
The Learning Factory, an interdisciplinary design program within the College
of Engineering. Russell Barton is professor of supply chain and information
systems at Penn State and co-director of the Master of Manufacturing Management
degree program, jointly offered by the Colleges of Business and Engineering.
Dave Celento is assistant professor of architecture at the university
and a licensed architect interested in digital fabrication, an emerging
interdisciplinary field that combines computer-aided engineering and manufacturing
tools with architecture.
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© 2008 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers