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Design has long expressed interest in interdisciplinary collaboration and periods of our history in design education attempted to prepare students for such work. The 1970s showed concern for collaboration among the design disciplines, often organized around a search for common methods. Students learned what it meant to design in various professional practices by taking courses in another design field or by creating the graphic components of large-scale projects that also involved architects and industrial designers.

In the 1980s, our interdisciplinary interests shifted to theory in fields other than design through which we could explain how audiences construct meaning. We borrowed from linguistics, literary criticism, and cultural theory to confront the questions raised by post-modernism. Faculty read and incorporated these borrowed theories into their project briefs, lectures, and assigned readings, and encouraged students to use general education classes to expand their understanding of related fields. Parallel interests in writing directed students to elective offerings in the humanities and to more formal instruction in criticism.

Today’s design problems exist at the scale of systems and communities, too big and too complex for any single discipline to address. Our collaborators are likely to be from fields as diverse as anthropology, cognitive psychology, computer science, business, and social policy. Yet the prevailing strategies of design education belong to another time and may leave graduates unprepared to address the interdisciplinary demands of complex, systems-level problems. Further, the approaches to developing student understanding in fields other than design are still those of general education, in which non-design courses parallel the core curriculum but are never truly integrated by design faculty in the work of studios.

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It could be said that the discipline has been slow to understand the full implications of interaction design and service design. Soon after the emergence of interactive technologies, some argued that the primary role of the computer was as a “tool” for replicating conventional production methods. Others questioned whether the skills of a print designer were adequate for creating the conditions for user experiences. And initially, interaction design focused mostly on buying and selling transactions and gaming, with design for education, work, and access to the privileges of democracy following only after the dot-com bust and the growth of social media. It is only within the last decade that design education has acknowledged the importance of screen-based experiences and much of that work is still in the tradition of film and motion graphics, not true interaction.

Service design is a relative newcomer to the field and challenges traditional object-centered notions of design. Service designer Shelley Evenson quotes an IBM report that places more than 70% of the US labor force in service delivery. She goes on to describe how designing a service is different from designing a product:

When designing a product, much of the focus is on mediating the interaction between the person and the artifact. Great product designers consider more of the context in their design. In service design, designers must create resources that connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. You must consider the environment, the channel, the touchpoints. Designing for service becomes a systems problem and often even a system of systems challenge. The elements or resources that designers need to create to mediate the interactions must work on all these levels and, at the same time, facilitate connections that are deeply personal, open to participation and change, and drop-dead stunning.

—Shelley Evenson interview in Saffer (2006), Designing for Interaction

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Design strategist Hugh Dubberly describes a paradigm shift from a mechanical/object-driven design process—in which there is top-down designer control and a finished, “almost perfect” end product—to an organic/systems ethos—in which ideas move from the bottom up and in which an evolving system is “good enough for now.” This shift argues for the design of tools and systems that adapt to users’ needs, preferences, and changing conditions.

Implicit in designing new tools and systems is the role of ever-evolving technologies. Mobile and sensor technologies, which can respond to unconscious gestures and changing environmental conditions, may not require visual systems for interaction. New augmented reality maps fuse geographic databases with live video feeds and images circulating through social networks. This shift raises questions about the role of a discipline that, historically, has been all about visual representation and the controlled planning process for arriving at a highly-refined artifact.

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Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book proclaimed, “The world is flat.” Friedman asserts that technology and economic shifts in the distribution of production and manufacturing have leveled the global playing field. While how to sell American products in other countries through culturally-sensitive motifs and messages once occupied much of our attention, the question today is how to collaborate with others in increasingly co-dependent relationships.

Urban studies professor and economist Richard Florida, on the other hand, argued in a 2005 article in the Atlantic Monthly that “the world is spiky;” that there are hills and valleys in the distribution of economic potential and that we cannot think of places as being homogenous in their culture or opportunities. Florida describes three sorts of places in the world that have less to do with geopolitical boundaries and more with potential in the confluence of resources: 1) those that can attract global talent and create new products; 2) those that manufacture the world’s goods and support its innovation engines; and 3) those with little connection to the global economy and few immediate prospects.

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A 2005 education survey by Metropolis Magazine showed no consensus among practitioners or educators about what constitutes design research; limited access to research findings from professional practice; nascent use of students as interns in the research process; and great confusion about what design issues deserve the greatest attention by researchers. Organizers of the 2007 conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research reported that only 10% of the paper submissions came from Americans, demonstrating that the US is behind other countries in the generation of new knowledge.

Despite this confusion, there is ample evidence that research will play an increasing role in the future of professional practice and that the typical usability testing in labs and focus groups will be insufficient in informing large-scale communication strategies and technological development. Further, it is apparent that design practitioners consider research to be proprietary and that any large-scale dissemination of new knowledge must come from academic institutions.

It is clear, therefore, that much work is yet to be done in building a research culture. Traditionally, undergraduate “research” activities have been defined in terms of existing information retrieval on the subject matter of the communication, the wants and needs of the client, and the technical demands of message production and distribution, little of which is transferrable to other projects. Further, in many programs there is limited curricular distinction between the research behaviors expected of undergraduate and graduate students, leaving the majority of master’s graduates unprepared for the scholarship and knowledge generation demands of current faculty positions in research-driven institutions.

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American philosopher John Dewey wrote in the 1930s that there are conditions that qualify “an experience” from other events in life. First, an experience must have a beginning and an end; we know when it starts and when it finishes. Dewey referred to this as “material running its course to fulfillment.” He provided examples, “a piece of work finished in a satisfactory way” or “a situation...[such as] a conversation...that is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation.” In other words, we can bookend an experience in ways that we cannot demarcate other passages of time.

Second, an experience is composed of parts that are distinct but that flow from one to another without interruption. We can remember its moments, but we recall them within a continuous whole. Dewey described this as “the enduring whole ...diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.” Third, says Dewey, an experience may be described in terms of a quality or unity by which we name it, and thus recall it long after it has happened. Finally, an experience has a pattern and a structure of alternating between doing and undergoing. Doing is the physical or sensory interaction with our environment that we associate with the experience, while undergoing is the mental reflection or emotion, necessary to interpret the doing; an action and a consequence linked in perception.