Using Creative Practice in Interdisciplinary Education

Interdisciplinary approaches in education help future professionals build better understanding and a common language between disciplines and individuals. To make such leaps, skills in adjusting to new situations and rapidly changing knowledge systems are needed. Such skills are intrinsic to design practice, and design and making practices lend themselves well to such personal development. Design and making activities also offer opportunities for students from different disciplines to gather around central topics and engage in interdisciplinary discussions about matters that concern everyone and to materialize their understanding while reflecting on their personal process. In this paper, we present a course design in which this type of transformational reflection might take place, and we discuss how designing and making processes can provide suitable means to build a platform for interdisciplinary discussions and learning. By examining an interdisciplinary group of students’ creative processes, we found that navigating unknown situations with the explorative and adaptive mind-set that emerges through reflection creates transferrable skills that are useful in interdisciplinary interactions and communication.Peer reviewe