Teaching Strategies Considering Interdisciplinary Practice in Industrial Design Curriculum

In order to prepare Industrial Design students for the realities of practice, it is essential they learn to collaborate with other disciplines as well as communicate and analyze context and information in various professional languages. This paper explains the theory and outlook shaping ID teaching methods, using some examples (research and design projects) from the ID program at Virginia Tech. Through these projects, we show the tools and means designed based on interdisciplinary approaches in teaching and also discuss their direct and indirect results. These examples include topics in healthcare design, public health, and user interaction design and evaluation; in collaboration with other academic fields and sectors, industry professionals, nonprofit organizations (or teams), with a community-based participatory approach. Within this study, we describe the process of investigating, practicing, and evaluating non-traditional teaching strategies to expose the students to experiential learning with a focus on an interdisciplinary professional environment.