Creative multidisciplinary design workshop

Abstract

Summary form only given. We have designed and conducted a pilot multidisciplinary design workshop for a team of graduate students. We are a multidisciplinary group of educators from computer science, geography and education. A primary motivation for our workshop was the reality that increasingly design and problem solving in engineering are complex, multidisciplinary tasks. Our shared interest is to better facilitate and educate multidisciplinary teams of students in group design and group design process. We conducted a pilot workshop in January, 1995, for a multidisciplinary group of six students, five graduates and one senior level undergraduate. Three were from geography (each with graduate training in cartography, geographic information systems (GIS) and/or map animation). Three were from computer science (each having taken one or more graduate courses in human computer interaction, graphics and/or visualization). The students were given the task of designing an interactive, software animation showing some aspect of the growth of the Internet.