Transdisciplinary Engineering Design Process: Tracing Design Similarities Through Comparison of Design Stages Across Engineering Disciplines

The integration of technology into contemporary product development practices has transformed the engineering design process from disciplinary [1-3] to transdisciplinary. This integration requires discipline experts to share technologies and knowledge beyond their traditional boundaries to design and create an artifact, thus resulting in a transdisciplinary design process. A transdisciplinary design process is a problem-solving activity that brings together, scientific knowledge and problem-solving techniques from multiple disciplines to solve a complex problem [4]. A significant number of industrial studies traced the design process commonalities between engineering disciplines across a broad spectrum of industries [5-7]. These studies identified a six-stage transdisciplinary design process, which is widely accepted and applicable across engineering disciplines. The six stages are Planning, Concept Development, System-Level Design, Detail Design, Implementation and Testing, and Production. In light of current transdisciplinary design practices in the industry, Ertas [8] identifies challenges currently faced by engineering education and suggests responding to these changes by introducing transdisciplinary engineering design education.