ABSTRACT
Julie T. Klein and Lisa Lattuca provide expansive definitions of interdisciplinarity and related concepts of multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, as well as summaries of the ways thinking and working across disciplines can be marked by communication challenges and clashes in competing paradigms. The method of interdisciplinary collaboration co-evolved with a critique of design conversations within a case of learning/teaching context as presented in a national public television series. The struggle for interdisciplinary communication is time-consuming, requires tolerance of ambiguity and an negotiation of responsibility. The use of engineering and design skills towards a multiplicity of diverse problems, instead of focused technical applications towards specific solutions, offered room for creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Each episode in the original series was organised around an assigned engineering and design problem. Design in the engineering context and design in the artistic context exist in parallel and as separate disciplines; the same could be said for design research.
