This grant provides funding to support a workshop on Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Programs to be held at the National Science Foundation on May 29-30, 2008. The invited participants will consist of key faculty and researchers from the United States, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden and several other countries who are involved in these unique graduate programs. Industry practitioners from well-known design firms and corporations will also participate. This workshop will provide a forum wherein the design community can discuss the challenges, successes, and future directions of these programs to gain new insights into how to construct, grow, and sustain interdisciplinary graduate programs that prepare students for successful design innovation. The participants will also discuss benchmarking metrics for program assessment while soliciting industry feedback on program improvements. The results will be widely disseminated through publications, a web site, presentations at ASEE and ASME conferences, a panel session at the 2008 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, and a special issue of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
The workshop will strengthen existing and emerging interdisciplinary graduate design programs across the country, improving our innovation output and increasing our competitive economic advantage. The workshop supports the emergence of a new model for graduate education which is based on tightly integrated interdisciplinary research. The interdisciplinary graduate design programs not only cross department boundaries within engineering but also span college boundaries through mutually beneficial partnerships with non-engineering programs at the university, e.g. architecture, business, art and design, society and technology. The lessons learned from creating, administering, and sustaining these interdisciplinary graduate design programs, which will be widely disseminated through publications and a web-based repository of knowledge, will provide substantive guidance to inform the creation of other novel and highly interdisciplinary graduate programs.
