Gesamtkunstwerk in Design: Interdisciplinary Design and Pedagogy

This paper examines the interdisciplinary practice within design realms including urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture and interior design. It discusses the pedagogical approaches at design schools to foster designers capable of design challenge with interdisciplinary skills. As the complexity of contemporary multicultural society increasingly requires a higher level of expertise in professional service, no individual designer can be expert in all fragmented expertise across the whole design and associated engineering areas. A designer, therefore, should rely on the expertise of other practitioners in areas where he or she doesn't possess proficiency and educational background. From this sense the need of interdisciplinary approaches across diverse range of design and engineering through the collaboration is rising. Historically most of discussion made on interdisciplinary approaches is limited to collaboration between architecture and supporting engineering. This paper focuses on the collaboration with design realms. Three case studies done in an interdisciplinary firm are explored, focusing on design process that is non-linear and complementary. Finally the integrative pedagogical approaches to provide students with more exposure to allied disciplines are navigated with exemplary student work from interdisciplinary design studio.