Transdisciplinary Design Approach - An Experimental Model to Project-based Teaching and Creative Problem Solving

In 1992, the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Montreal added multidisciplinary workshops to its academic program with the intention to encourage collaboration and communication between disciplines and to prepare students for the collaborative aspect in their professional life. However, experience has shown that simply joining disciplines is not sufficient. Established boundaries and hermetic discourses that academic disciplines developed over time tend to make collaboration complex and hinder the process of transcending boundaries. This paper discusses interand transdisciplinarity in design and describes our experimental project-based teaching model developed for the purpose of conveying methods of creative problem solving while stimulating transdisciplinary thinking.