Can Design Be A Common Ground Among Disciplines?

The act of designing is a complex activity with many facets, including multiple degrees of freedom, context, constraints, and an open-ended and ill-defined nature. Design has often been uniquely associated with fields within engineering, however several design scholars have highlighted that design is central to many fields outside of engineering as well. The artifacts resulting from design tasks may differ significantly from discipline to discipline, but the cognitive activities associated with the task, processes utilized, and negotiation of the design space have been shown to have fundamental similarities. As the global push for interdisciplinary interactions increases, design can be a bridging link for fields traditionally seen as unconnected. The discovery of common ground between disciplines can support cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication and provide an opportunity to improve design education by collaborative research and practice. In an investigation of design experiences of professional designers, common aspects of the experiences were identified as building blocks to establishing common ground. Emerging from qualitative accounts of design experiences by professional designers in engineering, visual and performing arts, architecture, and science were six key themes about the experience of designing. These themes, which were discussed in the experiences of all ten participants in this study, included getting starting on a design, collaboration as a key aspect, the importance of a strong content base, the ever-changing nature of the design space, the role of context, and the challenge and satisfaction of seeing a design task from beginning to end.