In a recent keynote at Valencia Design Education Forum IBM Design Director Karel Vredenburg pointed out the fact that many design graduates fall short when it comes to collaborative skills. In an internal study conducted at IBM Karel and his colleagues even found out that amongst the skills that are missing most when employing design graduates, 38% relate to the topic of multidisciplinary collaboration.
As a response to that shortfall, companies such as IBM start offering their own onboarding programmes that include bootcamps or internships and give young employees the opportunity to skill up to a level that allows tham to embed into the company’s collaborative culture.
From a design education perspective this of course raises the question whether the design programmes being offered around the world are missing courses and pedagogical approaches that would build up the necessary competencies in collaboration. Sure, Interdisciplinarity, Multidisciplinarity or transdisplinarity are amongst the most commonly used buzzwords in design education for many years now. But apparently even the resulting projects and programmes miss out on teaching students how to think and act collaboratively.
In fact, as a design educator I’m asking myself how to foster collaboration between design students and partners from other disciplines, for years now. This is, when in 2016 the model of the “Y-Shaped Designer” emerged and became the foundation for our undisciplinary MA Programme at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland.
Even if Karel Vredenburg sure can draw from a lot more experience in the field than I do, some of the experiences made when I started to apply the “Y-Shaped Model” at our programmes by creating a pedagogical framework that stresses and provokes collaboration amongst both learners and educators might be worth sharing. Back in 2018, I got invited as a Keynote speaker to the sixth EIMAD – Research Meeting on Music, Arts and Design in Castelo Branco, Portugal and talked about some of these experiences made – enjoy watching the video.
