Making a College-Level Multidisciplinary Design Program Effective and Understanding the Outcomes

The University of Michigan’s College of Engineering (CoE) has committed to a significant Multidisciplinary Design (MD) Program complementing the bachelor degree programs. This enables students from across degree programs and even outside of the CoE to collaborate on projects. This is currently being done by flexibly addressing instructional and practicum needs through a series of short seminars, semester and multi-semester long project work, and a minor. Participation by students varies from 1⁄2 day events up to and including the full academic minor. We are developing and evaluating ways to track performance of the program, students, and graduates. We recently completed an initial study of students who were currently engaged in or previously engaged in multidisciplinary design team experiences outside of the classroom. This type of experience is central to the MD minor, thus our work targeted a better understanding of the nature of students’ work and the outcomes of their work with respect to their own development. Further work has begun to study questions centered on students’ experience of practicing creativity within the program. Our next steps include transferring lessons learned into broader curricula of our bachelor degree programs, connecting with masters-level programs, reach for more students, and incorporating more disciplines in our programming.