The Impact of Multidisciplinary Design Education on the Creative Process in Collaborative Design

Abstract

In an industrial environment, individuals from different kinds of academic backgrounds often form a team to work on a project. This study was designed to find out whether a multidisciplinary design education could have an influence on the process of concept design, which plays a pivotal role in the creative output, in the context of a multidisciplinary team where students from different departments form a team to complete a project. The creativity of the multidisciplinary design teams and of the non-multidisciplinary design teams was compared through a design task conducted twice with heterogeneous participants. Along with our evaluation of the creative output, we classified conversation contents according to a coding scheme in order to find out which design process could have an influence on the creativity of idea sketching. Moreover, we carried out an analysis of the number of conversations and of their contents in the teams belonging to each category. It was found that when students from various departments form a team, students who have received a multidisciplinary design education show more creative idea sketching, take part in more conversations using external knowledge and contributing to the problemsolving process, generate more ideas, and conduct more active reviews and summaries than students majoring in design only.The study enabled us to confirm that multidisciplinary design education was meeting its goal of equipping students with abilities to solve diverse problems that can arise within a team made up of members with different kinds of academic back-grounds in an actual industrial field.