Eujin Pei, Mark Evans, Ian Campbell; Department of Design & Technology, Loughborough University, United Kingdom

"Interdisciplinary Collaboration : Education through Practice" - by Robert Dunay, Joeseph Wheeler and Robert Schubert. Students and practitioners from architecture, industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture, mechanical, electrical, and structural engineering developed new and efficient components comprising a house that derives all of its energy from the sun. The goal is to develop sustainable design - and thinking about design - through an educational environment that inculcates collaborative teamwork.

One of Icsid’s unique strengths as a global design network is that we have both education and corporate members, and there is great potential for these two pillars to partner in mutually beneficial ways. This column talks about how design schools can collaborate with companies to strengthen their educational programs and, from the business point of view, to understand the advantages companies receive from working with design schools.

Paul Rand was once asked, “What are the fundamental skills of a designer?” He answered, “It’s all intuition. And you can’t teach intuition.” The source of this cherished element of the creative process—the genius theory of the divinely inspired artist—is evident in the follow-up question. Asked the difference between a designer and an artist, Rand said: “There is no difference between a designer and an artist. They both work with form and content.

“My life, my card.” This is the slogan for the current American Express credit card campaign, in many ways an imitation of the MasterCard “priceless” campaign. The marketing idea in both cases is to connect the use of credit cards to our most memorable and important life experiences, perhaps even to make the use of the card one of those experiences itself.

In my visits to design colleges around the world, it is very difficult to find a school that is not practicing some form of interdisciplinary education. With varying degrees of commitment and success, it appears that everybody is doing it, or at least talking about it, as the many conferences on the subject demonstrate. Although industrial design has always stood at the intersection of business and engineering, the trend toward mixing and matching the design fields really took off about fifteen years ago, when design professionals began to recognize the value of collaborating with each other.