COGNITION AND TRANSDISCIPLINARY DESIGN: AN EDUCATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING DESIGN CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Contemporary engineering product design and development no longer adheres to the boundaries of a single discipline and has become tightly integrated, often relying on interaction of multiple disciplines for completion of integrated product design projects. In order to design these products, design and development practice has transcended the discipline boundaries to become a transdisciplinary engineering design process. A collaboration of specialists from different engineering disciplines is required to develop efficient solutions to interdisciplinary problems of product design. Despite this shift from mono-disciplinary to transdisciplinary, the engineering design curriculum remains focused on teaching discipline specific design practice through skill based subject specific pedagogy with a limited emphasis on the importance of design process and transdisciplinarity in the design process. As a result, new graduates starting in design and development organizations face a difficulty finding a common basis of understanding of disciplines’ interactions and must go through a process of often implicit ‘onboarding’ to understand the transdisciplinary engineering design process. This can be avoided by developing and adapting undergraduate design process education in line with industrial demands. This paper proposes a theoretical framework based on empirical engineering design research in industry, educational psychology and teaching approaches such as Bloom’s Taxonomy and Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning for developing the core elements of a transdisciplinary engineering design process curriculum.