Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Process

2Transdisciplinary Design Process

What we need are new choices – new products that balance the needs of the individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that result in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them.

Tim Brown, 2009

2.1 Introduction

Recent studies suggest engineering education must evolve to teach a more holistic approach to problem solving in order to better prepare students to handle the growing complex problems inherent in today's society.

Definitions of TD research go back to the early 1970s.¹ According to Ertas et al.:

Transdisciplinarity can be defined as the practice of acquiring new knowledge through education, research, design, and production with a broad emphasis on complex problem solving and the use of knowledge and techniques from multiple scholarly disciplines. TD methods are unique in their ability to bring discipline-specific knowledge together holistically in order to clove complex problems. The goal of transdisciplinary practice is to improve students' understanding of complex issues by extracting the valuable aspects of typical academic disciplines and thereby generating both a more integrative and universal solution to support an issue of importance to society.²

In another paper, Ertas et al. say:

TD research and education also focus on leveraging intellectual diversity, collaborative effort, cross-pollinating ...