A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO DESIGN EDUCATION

World economies face complex challenges that require new approaches to innovation, collaborating across disciplines and cultures. Climate change, aging population and the need to develop more sustainable ways to produce resources for a growing demand pushed the boundaries of the traditional ways of working [1]. In this context our Academy is tackling the growing need for people that can manage complexity and innovation developing the Design discipline with a multidisciplinary approach. Our master courses are structured in workshops organized in collaboration with Companies that provide a brief and a framework to develop five week projects. In this way students are exposed to real-world projects and practical design assignments that replicate today's professional design. This is important to ensure that the contents, as well as the tools provided to the students, are meeting the changing needs of industry. At the same time, it presents challenges that are not attached to a particular discipline, but that require a collaborative approach to develop projects that usually involve outputs from different areas of Design, like visual, interaction, service, interior, business and product design. On the other hand, the courses are structured in a way that allow each student to create a personalized path based on their professional needs and interests. They initially follow two core workshops of the master course they are attending to and then they select the last two workshops from the wide offer provided by the rest of the Masters. This dynamic gives us the opportunity to define working teams that are not only multicultural, since 97% of our students come from 43 countries, but also multidisciplinary. Given this scenario, we recognized the importance of creating a framework that manages the differences within heterogeneous teams and takes advantage of the strengths and potentials that different backgrounds and different cultures can bring to a project. As a result, students across disciplines and from different countries share points of view on design and learn to combine these ideas in their own fresh expressions, doing research and creating concepts in collaboration with their teammates to then develop the specific touchpoints connected to their own disciplines. This paper introduces the didactic methodology used to foster this collaboration in multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork and illustrates the main challenges and benefits of this design process presenting a selection of projects developed by the students as best practices.