Study of Interdisciplinary Visual Communication in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

This study uses an experimental approach to explore the relationship between individuals' disciplinary backgrounds in engineering and how they draw objects that are common to different disciplines within nanoscience and nanotechnology. We recruited graduate students (n = 16) from three engineering disciplines at the University of Washington. We report responses to a design task where subjects were asked to draw diagrammatic representations that captured their interpretation of disciplinary prompts from three areas of engineering-Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Findings highlight two important elements of modern academic scholarship and teaching in engineering: (i) baseline visual communication competency appears to be higher than anticipated; (ii) interdisciplinary boundary-crossing appears to be on the rise, because while there are disciplinary biases it appears that there are much fewer than expected. We discuss implications of these findings for teaching in areas such as nanoscience and nanotechnology and suggest future avenues that might elaborate on related questions pertaining to disciplinary boundary-crossing, nanotechnology and visual design.