Engineering Design and Communication: The Case for Interdisciplinary Collaboration*

This paper describes an innovative, interdisciplinary, project-based freshman course at North-western University–Engineering Design and Communication (EDC). The course fully integratesengineering design with freshman communication and is taught collaboratively by faculty fromEngineering and from Arts and Sciences. Working on real projects for real clients, students acquireskills in communication, design, and teamwork and also come to see design and communication ascomplementary parts of the same iterative and creative problem-solving enterprise. We argue thatthis interdisciplinary approach improves the teaching of both communication and design andprovides students with an exceptionally solid foundation for their future engineering courses andcareers