Interdisciplinary Design Education Based on Collaboration Between Arts and Engineering Schools

In this paper, the new graduate course, referred to as “Creation and Innovation”, for interdisciplinary design and innovation is introduced based on the collaboration between arts and engineering. In this course, students having various backgrounds in arts and engineering schools participates and forms several interdisciplinary teams for project-based learning. The systematic methods such as Design Thinking Process and Strategic Foresight and Innovation have been combinatorially adopted for this course. Those methods are human-centered approaches, which allow deep understanding on users’ needs and wants by being empathized with users and their environments. This empathy activity can enable the students to actively consider users’ various aspects, which has been of much significance in the current interdisciplinary design education. It is also shown that the collaboration among the team members with the backgrounds of arts and engineering can be effective to generate more creative and innovative ideas by combining their holistic and analytic views.