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Interdisciplinary: challenges and opportunities for design education

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posted on 2018-07-23, 15:05 authored by James Self, Mark EvansMark Evans, Gyuchan Thomas JunGyuchan Thomas Jun, Darren SoutheeDarren Southee
We explore the potential drivers for and barriers to interdisciplinary education in design from the student learning perspective. To achieve this, a series of in-depth student interview studies were conducted at two interdisciplinary design schools in the Republic of Korea and the UK. Results indicated both awareness and synthesis of interdisciplinary perspectives across the two schools. However, these abilities appeared more heavily dependent upon individual student attitudes and interests, compared to the programmes of study themselves. Instructor bias and potential integration issues at school and institutional levels were further cited as challenges to interdisciplinarity. However, results also indicated application as a key driver for the acquisition and synthesis of disciplinary perspectives. Students, within the applied discipline of design, responded well to interdisciplinarity when accompanied by opportunities to integrate disciplinary knowledge through application within their own project works. Implications for interdisciplinary approaches to design education are finally discussed together with suggested avenues for future investigation.

Funding

This work was supported by the UNIST Creative Project Fund 1.150129.01.

History

School

  • Design

Published in

International Journal of Technology and Design Education

Volume

29

Issue

4

Pages

843 - 876

Citation

SELF, J. ... et al, 2018. Interdisciplinary: challenges and opportunities for design education. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 29 (4), pp.843-876.

Publisher

© Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-06-28

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in International Journal of Technology and Design Education. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10798-018-9460-5.

ISSN

0957-7572

eISSN

1573-1804

Language

  • en

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