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OK. We hear about the shining results of multidisciplinary design and the benefits of it in understanding the user’s needs and producing inclusive products. More and more design companies are adopting the culture of having a broad range of team members with different backgrounds that collaborate in multiple projects.  With no doubt, these firms are doing their part in schooling the next generation of thinkers. However the question is, are these individuals ready to work in this fashion when they start their career?

This leads me to the following question, are multidisciplinary firms functioning as an extension to the educational body to train the classic designer, researcher or scientist in order to get them ready to take on a project and be able to work interactively with other team members?  Moreover, what about taking a liberal arts approach to looking at our problems and focusing on subjects such as humanities and anthropology that are traditionally associated with liberal arts. What does a new multidisciplinary approach look like? It means a deeper understanding of global and historical contexts and perspectives, a future-oriented focus, one that incorporates social responsibility.

Companies like to train people narrowly so that they do one job really well and they usually don’t like the idea of a “jack of all Trades”. However, there is a new meaning to the phrase when there is need for more emphasis on multidisciplinary perspectives.  The crack really starts to appear when a scientist or engineer comes on board. It is probably for this reason that most design studios “collaborate” with an external party to run the technological/ scientific part of their project.

If the industry has accepted multidisciplinary work as a natural shift from the conventional methodology of execution, educational institutions should take their role in training the “renaissance men” who can smoothly position themselves in collaborative environment and be prepared to face multifaceted projects that they may have not been exposed to. Multidisciplinary design will only be successful in the real world when cross-disciplinary research is promoted in the body of the education.

During my undergraduate studies in Aerospace Engineering I was repetitively told to not waste time thinking about alternative projects and to focus on my tedious schedule and deadlines- I complied. It wasn’t until when I decided to apply for graduate studies that I realized how rigidly our educational systems are designed. The application forms often ask the potential applicants to choose a department and under every department there are distinctive disciplines that you can choose from. But, I was looking for something different.

My wide variety of interests was often pointed out as a weakness during my teenage years and so they would say, she is a “jack of all trades”. Therefore, I decided to follow one of my interests at undergraduate level, which was Aerospace Engineering. Longing to become an astronaut since childhood kept me going during the tough times as engineering student but the experience taught me that being a really good engineer would only take me as far as managing directing engineers who are equally good at what they do. I often found it painful to focus on one small aspect of a very large project with no connection to what the others were doing. Whether it was calculating the size of a fuel droplet that leaves the jet engine or analyzing the seismic loads on a reactor’s structure, I did not have any real perspective of how my work would impact society, who the end users were, or how my work was related to the overall goal of the project.

I was lacking the vision and the interaction between what I was practicing as an engineer and the connection with the outside world was lost. I was frustrated by the rigidness of how scientific knowledge is transferred to the educators in the university as well as the isolation I was experiencing in the work environment- the cubical layout of most of these environments didn’t help either. Group work usually meant completing specific tasks on an individual basis and when reports were due, the “isolated creatures” would come out of their nests and go into meeting rooms to report the outcome. I was intrigued how most people wouldn’t questions the way things were going for more than 15 years. The answer was in the way engineering has been practiced in the academia- a linear methodology that is heavily based on lecturing students and examining them. The question is handed over to the students and they are rarely asked to identify the problem themselves, or to challenge the question they’re given.

With emergence of new science and disciplines, the educational community has been trying to cope with a lag for the past few years. This is evident when one looks at new disciplines that didn’t exist in the educational system twenty years ago. (i.e. Nanotechnology, Interaction design, etc). What’s surprising however, is the sluggishness of the academia in shifting from the traditional divisions and departmental sections to multidisciplinary work that’s being practiced on daily basis outside the classroom.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with me in that there are no problems in the world (no matter how small, or specialized the problem is) that deal with one field of study and therefore can be isolated in one discipline. Even the most rigorous processes are affected by human factors when applied in real world situations. It is therefore, clear that engineers, as problem solvers, will need to be able to adapt themselves to the plasticity of world’s problems and be prepared to apply a new way of thinking when it comes to unfamiliar situations that they haven’t been exposed to. In my opinion, this only happens when problems are contextualized beyond fields of studies and people with specialties collaborate together without isolating the problem at any stage. We need more “jack and Jane of all trades” in order to accelerate a positive influence on our world.