Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching: Frameworks and Practice Conference, Sheffield, Birleşik Krallık, 07 Nisan 2016
Recently we witness a rising interest in interdisciplinary collaboration
in both industrial design and engineering education. This interest is triggered
by the observation that professionals who do not experience interdisciplinary
cooperation during undergraduate education find it challenging to work with people
from other disciplines. Considering that developing technology and innovation
invites more complex design problems which are often beyond the professional
skills and competences of a single person, learning how to work in
interdisciplinary teams becomes a central concern within the undergraduate programs
of these fields. This paper focuses on peer learning as an important aspect of
interdisciplinary design teams in the context of extra-curricular education
activities. The empirical data comes from the accounts of 42 undergraduate and
postgraduate students who participated in the Interdisciplinary Design Studio
(IDS), which is the first educational activity organised by Middle East
Technical University Design Factory in October 2015. In IDS, students from the
Departments of Industrial Design, Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical
and Electronics Engineering, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Computer
Engineering, and Business Administration came together in six interdisciplinary
teams to develop innovative products following the stages of a design process.
Throughout the four-week IDS, students presented their work to and got feedback
on their projects from an interdisciplinary team of tutors, which consists of
faculty members from Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Architecture, and
Faculty Economic and Administrative Sciences. Drawing on the semi-structured
interviews with the students, this paper presents a comparison between learning
from peers versus learning from tutors, highlighting that students foreground
the former over the latter as a more effective way of learning about
interdisciplinarity.