Keywords

1 Introduction

In the new global economy era multidisciplinary knowledge and capabilities are required for gaining competitive advantages and foster innovation [1, 2]. Previous research addressed the need to enable effective collaboration among people from different disciplines, and found that successful multidisciplinary encounters depend on tailoring the selection of a theme, participants, and location to the encounter’s particular objectives [3]. In particular, universities are revising their curriculum for including disciplines like social science, humanities, cultural and management studies so students will be prepared to the changing needs of industry and society which seek to bridge the gap that exists between producers and consumers of technology. Moreover, students need to understand the financial, business, environmental economic and social constraints in which engineers operate [4]. For this aim, multidisciplinary learning opportunities are organized where participants are familiarized with one another’s profession and learn to appreciate dissimilar viewpoints [5]. In line with this, innovation can no longer be considered as a ‘functional problem’ but rather it touches on all aspects of society including cultural and environmental issues [6, 7]. Following that, comes the idea that research and development (R&D) functions are not enough to drive innovation, and novel perspective requires involving the users’ experience as part of the R&D processes [7, 8]. Within this new business environment, design skills have a central role in driving innovation processes and bridging different fields as engineering, humanities, social science, economic and production disciplines [9]. These design skills foster design thinking in innovation management, encompassing creative, proactive and empathic approach to connect different bodies of knowledge in order to shape innovative solutions [10, 11] as Meyer [12] phrased:

“Combining strategic objectives and technical business requirements with emotions and conceptual thinking, design thinking is used to create interactions between people and systems, products or technology, with a goal of making those interactions simple, intuitive, and empathetic.” p. 42

Although the literature suggests that multidisciplinary programs are beneficial for broadening the students’ perspectives, there are scant reports that describe the interdisciplinary educational experiences and the interactions that occur among their participants. This paper presents an empirical study on several multidisciplinary learning events which include one workshop and two courses and its main contribution is outlining recommendations for leveraging the learning experience of students from all disciplines. The paper is organized as follows: first related background regarding the cognitive capabilities underpinning design and creativity in multidisciplinary teams is presented in Sect. 2. This is continued in Sect. 3 with the presentation of the agile framework [13] as a practitioners’ framework that aims at delivering a faster designed outcome in the context of diversity and design thinking. This background served as the theoretical ground for analyzing the empirical study, presented next, followed with the study’s analysis and findings, and concludes with recommendations and future research direction.

2 Design and Creativity

The term design evolved from the original meaning of design and production of an object, to two different terms design as art and design as engineering [2].

“Design is the conscious decision-making process by which information (an idea) is transformed into an outcome, be it tangible (product) or intangible (service).” p. 17

Hence, design requires decision making, based on comparing alternatives, exploring and experimenting which may lead to innovation. Today, there is a growing awareness of the need to create multifunctional teams which include designers and engineers during new product development process, as a strategic tool, for gaining competitive advantage and foster innovation [2, 6]. Combining capabilities of creators, empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers with logical and linear thinkers, can change the way organizations operate [1]. Moreover, designers are educated to deal with fuzzy and unpredictable situations and projects that require personal perspective, visual presentations, emotional involvement and almost no quantification [7]. Conversely, managers and engineers, study accounting, finance, and related analytical subjects.

While the idea of assembling multidisciplinary team in design processes is essential to innovation, people with different professional backgrounds often have different value system that can lead to misunderstanding and conflict [2]. Nevertheless, western society is changing because forces such as globalization, nonmaterial yearnings and powerful technologies are reducing computer-like professions. Therefore, multidisciplinary working practices are required, and a new approach is needed for fostering abilities of empathy, understanding human interactions and eliciting purpose and meaning [1]. The challenge is to enable the integration of sequential, logical and analytical thinking with nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic thinking [1]. Former study pointed at the important role of teammates’ background knowledge and experience to foster creativity in multidisciplinary teams. The study also claimed that a good balance between individual performance and team dynamics is vital to the success in a multidisciplinary team process [14].

3 Agile Framework, Diversity and Design Thinking

The agile framework emerged towards the end of the 20th century and is accepted today as one of the main software development management styles in many software companies. Although the agile framework clearly originates in the profession of software development, its novelty is in addressing the human aspects of the process rather than the technological ones and its main guidelines are applicable to various domains beyond software development processes [13]. The agile framework addresses several aspects in teams’ work. Among them, the most relevant ones to the multidisciplinary teams presented in this study, are: teams’ leadership; teammates’ responsibility; iterative development and testing processes; team’s goal and time management; transparency and knowledge sharing; and customer involvement.

It is, nowadays, accepted that the transparent nature of agile environments fosters diversity since team members have more opportunity to be exposed to new ideas and perspectives, thus enhancing the chance for innovation. According to Hazzan and Dubinsky [15], agile teams may benefit from this enhanced diversity in several ways. First, the more diverse a team is, the more wide-ranging perspectives are elicited; consequently, teammates are exposed to others’ perspectives and can use these different viewpoints in different or new (problem-solving) situations. Second, the project deliverable itself may be improved since the expression of different perspectives with respect to a specific aspect of the deliverable enhances the chances that subtle issues will emerge; consequently, additional factors are considered when decisions related to the said deliverable are made. Third, the entire process is questioned more when diverse opinions are expressed, and, once again, the team may gain a more argument-based process. Fourth, diversity reduces resistance to new ideas and establishes an open atmosphere towards alternative opinions. Finally, as more companies become global, diversity is becoming an integral characteristic of teams and, therefore, cannot be over-looked. It is but natural to assume that a team that welcomes diversity will assimilate its behavior in this global market in a more natural and successful manner.

The design thinking approach puts the customer up-front, similar to the agile approach, however it emphasizes on building empathy with users, observing their behavior and drawing conclusions about what people want and need. In addition, it fosters the use of emotional language, such as desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience, to describe products and users [11].

Lately, the agile and design thinking approaches were integrated to one framework for delivering a faster outcome in an innovative, dynamic environment that addresses the need to rethink the customer needs [16]. In addition, emotional attributes and notations are inserted into current modeling languages for expressing emotional goals and motivations for realizing users’ perceptions of systems [17].

4 Empirical Study

4.1 Method and Settings

The research took place at the Israeli Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, which is unique in the extent to which engineering and visual design schools co-exist and collaborate. There are several learning events at Shenkar where students from engineering, design and art participate in multidisciplinary learning events. I will briefly elaborate on the various experiences that served as the research fields in the empirical study:

  1. 1.

    Shenkar’s annual ‘Jam Week’ which brings together lecturers and students from the Engineering, Design and Art schools, in a variety of joint workshops in which multidisciplinary teams brainstorm and create products that combine design, art and technology. I was a co-organizer in one of these workshops, where the study reported here took place, involving 40 students, 19 from the engineering school and 21 from the design and art schools.

  2. 2.

    The ‘The Interdisciplinary Lab’ course which was given by lecturers from the Software Engineering and Visual Communications departments and an external instructor who specializes in data journalism. The course was offered to third year design students specializing in interaction design and to software engineering students specializing in mobile and web platforms. There were around 50 students in the course, 30 from the engineering school and 20 from the design school.

  3. 3.

    The course ‘Smart Interactions Design in the Era of Internet of Things’ given in the ‘Kadar center for design and technology’, in which students from Design, Art and Engineering schools participated and created innovative interaction solutions to challenges given by the lectures who manage the Kadar center. There were 10 students in the class, 7 from the design and art schools and 3 from the engineering school.

While the first event was a four-day workshop, the two others were full semester courses. In all the three learning events the students had to cope with ill-structured problems, which will be presented in the next section.

As a researcher I participated in all these events, during the first event, the annual ‘Jam week’, as a participant observer and during the two others, as an observer. The main research objective was to learn how multidisciplinary teams work and collaborate. According to this objective the following research questions (RQs) were:

RQ1::

Which design processes are practiced in multidisciplinary teams?

RQ2::

What disciplines are actually represented in the design process?

RQ3::

Do the teams’ solutions exhibit the various capabilities of the teammates?

I observed and conducted several unstructured interviews with the students and lecturers from all the events. During the field observations notes were taken, focusing on conversations among the teammates, the guidelines presented by the lectures, the feedback that were given by the students, lecturers, and guests and the processes that took place during the learning events. In addition, students from the various disciplines were interviewed regarding the role they took in their teams and their perceptions about the learning experience. In each event I conducted around 5 interviews in case I had to clarify an observed issue, when students approached me for sharing insights or when I wanted to get their feedbacks. The gathered data were qualitatively analyzed [18]. Using its inductive methodology, the notes taken during the observations and interviews were mapped to the emergent categories of professional discussions; professional tools; solutions’ requirements; and students’ engagement.

4.2 Analysis and Findings

The analysis of the gathered data showed that students were eager to meet colleagues from various disciplines, for extending their perceptions and learning experience. This was expected, otherwise students would have not participated in these events (only the first event is mandatory). Moreover, the students at Shenkar have lately started a new initiative, entitled “Dots” (aiming at connecting the dots) for fostering multidisciplinary learning events. With regard to the research questions presented above the analysis revealed:

RQ1::

During the three learning events, for each challenge’s solving process, the teams went through three phases: ideation, implementation and presentation. The terminology used by the lecturers and teams was design rather than engineering oriented. The learning events started with the presentations of challenges in a brief format, which is a common practice in design and art courses, where students get an open question or challenge which lead them to research and brainstorming. For example, in the course “The Interdisciplinary Lab” they got a data file in which they had to find meaningful paths and present it in an infographic design; in the course “Smart Interactions Design” they got a challenge to create users’ interaction experience in the open space of Shenkar. In contrary, engineers are used to more defined challenges with detailed requirements in a specific context. Moreover, in the three learning events, during the ideation phase, there was an emphasis not to think about the technology but rather on the users’ experience, as if there were no technological barriers. The students got ideation triggers such as “What the users will feel?” “What kind of dialogue it evokes?” “Don’t think how to implement the ideas, just brainstorm”, “What is the beauty in this idea?”

The shared theme of this year ‘Jam week’ workshops was “Changing from the bottom, how academy can contribute to its environment?” While it is a very social theme, in many workshops the integration of social design and technical implementation could have been applied. For example, during my workshop which was entitled “From social networks to human networks”, they had to solve challenges presented by several social organizations. The students from all disciplines got a guideline to use their professional capabilities, however, all the teams produced physical objects, but only few added technologic suggestions and outcomes, although it could have enhanced their proposed solutions. In one case, a team produced creative toys made of recycled plastics and textiles to kindergarten of foreign workers’ children, as shown in Fig. 1. However, they could have added a social software platform around their idea for enabling the creation of a social community for fostering recycling textiles and plastics.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Toys created in the ‘Jam Week’ workshop

Full size image

During the second phase, after each team decided on which idea to focus, the implementation phase started. In the courses that lasted for a whole semester, students could actually build a working prototype, consisting of either a physical object or infographic application, which required software development and in the “Smart Interactions Design in the Era of Internet of Things” course, hardware implementations as well. In this phase, the design and art students were responsible to find the materials or create art works that suit their ideas, and the engineering students dealt mainly with the technical and technological issues.

The third phase of the process was presenting the final products and involved, besides the teams and lecturers, guests who were not part of the learning experience. The guests were either professionals in the different disciplines or the users that initiated the challenges. The feedback often praised the creative ideas and sometimes pointed at difficulties to implement the ideas in real settings

RQ2::

During the ideation phase, the design and art students used storyboarding, which is a common visual practice in the design domain, in which designers sketch user experience scenarios; and video prototyping in the “Smart Interactions Design in the Era of Internet of Things” course.

In the all three learning events, multidisciplinary teams could have faced with the need to develop a technological solution, either in the form of software or hardware, in addition to the design challenge. Nevertheless, while visual design practices were employed, especially in the brainstorming and prototyping phases, almost no engineering design practices, such as textual modeling frameworks (e.g., ERD), were used. Although the engineering students were equipped with the necessary design modeling knowledge, they did not use it, and moved directly from high level abstraction of the ideation phase, to the technical implementation phase of their projects. In addition, all the teams’ development processes were not managed in professional ways, although there were students who came from the Industrial Engineering and Management department, with knowledge about project management practices. Neither of the teams defined formal management responsibilities (besides professional ones that exhibited design or engineering capabilities), nor used any of the agile practices which were discussed in Sect. 3 above.

RQ3::

The final projects exhibited the capabilities of the teammates’ to some extent which differed in each learning experience. The design capabilities were manifested in all the projects, dealt very seriously and the designers were very anxious to deliver the outcome in the most professional manner. Moreover, the feedback they got throughout the experience emphasized design and not engineering issues. The technical development should have mainly functioned properly, implementing the design requirements. During the ‘Jam week’ events, due to the very short time of the experience, only in one challenge the students managed to present a manifestation of their technological solution and actually built a site using the WixFootnote 1 platform, which is a commercial free platform for creating websites. In the other challenges they came with ideas, without bringing it to some sort of professional outcome, neither as models nor prototypes. In the two other courses the technological parts were prototypes that reflected the designers’ requirements. The outcomes were missing engineering design models which could have later be developed to more matured products. Moreover, feedback from the presentation phases strengthened the overall impression that if the engineering contributions were professionally manifested throughout the learning event, the prototypes, either built or suggested, could have addressed more real setting considerations and solutions

From the above it shows that there was no balance in the multidisciplinary teams between design and engineering practices. An engineering student summed this in his words:

“The idea to bring together students from engineering and design is great, and Shenkar is the best place to leverage this up. In order to enhance this experience I suggest to use the managerial practices of Industrial Engineering and Management students who possess managerial capabilities and can use risk and time management tools. When the challenge is presented only with design words, the engineers do not relate to it and do not connect the words to their profession. Therefore, it should be more balanced so everyone can feel connected. In my workshop the process started to advance when an engineer said, we must go on we can’t talk all day about the design of one button, it shouldn’t be perfect…”

5 Conclusion

The paper reports on an empirical research conducted during multidisciplinary learning events at Shenkar, in which students from the Engineering, Design and Art schools collaboratively worked in multidisciplinary teams. Such experience is important to students before entering the job market, as nowadays companies develop ‘smart information systems’ through design thinking processes that involve multidisciplinary perspectives and diverse teams [6]. Hence, realizing the way to better teach students during multidisciplinary learning events is vital for preparing them to real jobs’ demands.

The study revealed that students were enthused to participate in such experience and found it educational and enjoyable. However, according to the presented study, the learning experience can be leveraged so students, from all disciplines, can utilize these events to their full potential. The data gathered in the various experiences shows that while design perspectives are emphasized and discussed, the engineering and management ones are hardly mentioned and practiced. The outcomes of the multidisciplinary teams show that adding engineering and management practices to the learning processes could have leveraged the teams’ work in both their working processes as well as their final products. Modeling the products’ with engineering capabilities could have helped considering different users and processes, making the abstract design ideas more realistic and robust that could have applied to additional audiences. In addition, managing the whole process could have made the learning experience relevant to all the teammates who would have been more engaged in the learning events and responsible to their roles. Therefore, in line with previous study [14], the main recommendation is elevating the potential of teammates so each one of them will feel responsible and equally contribute to the final product. There should be a balance between open, free of barriers thinking and more realistic, down to earth solutions, otherwise there will be a gap between the ideation and implementation phases. Following, the terminology used in multidisciplinary learning experiences should be consist of the different disciplines’ terminology and appeal to the whole teammates. In addition, employing the agile framework within the multidisciplinary learning experience can contribute to manage the whole process and foster design thinking, as found in related study [16].

This study sheds light on the potential and challenges of multidisciplinary teams in development processes in general and in information system development processes in particular. Nowadays, when universities seek new forms of multidisciplinary learning that foster collaboration, problem solving and innovation [19], this study can help in building programs with well-defined projects that stimulate students to achieve fruitful results. However, the generalization of this preliminary research may be limited as it reports on few experiences in one academic institute. Future research will continue to explore and study multidisciplinary learning experiences in various domains and institutes.