Implementing an Interdisciplinary Marketing/Engineering Course Project: Project Format, Preliminary Evaluation, and Critical Factor Review

Abstract

This article reports on an innovative product development class project in which marketing and bio-resource engineering students work together. The project modifies a project suggested by Lunsford and Henshaw employing marketing and engineering students. The project is executed as a professional development activity designed to give students a broader perspective on their discipline as well as model the types of work teams they will experience on the job. This article describes the approach to the project used by the interdisciplinary team of instructors, the faculty and the students' responses to the project, and suggested improvements for further implementations.

Interaction for design

“…At present, interdisciplinary approach does not appear as a choice, but more like an obligatory for a productive perception of today's problems. The status of each discipline change, their boundaries become fuzzier, while professional topics are often founded in more than discipline (Skinner, Mckeage, Seymour, Donahue, & Christensen, 1999).…”

“…In particular, design activity requires knowledge acquired from informatics, engineering, industrial design, manufacturing, ergonomics, psychology, marketing, organisational behaviour among others (Eppinger et al, 1990). Thus, it becomes essential for a designer to be able to collaborate and interact with other participants of a variety of domains in order to organise and understand the concepts and the terms emerge from each discipline; a process that requires communication and teamwork skills in order to mobilise others to interact with his/her own (con)text (Skinner et al, 1999) (Ballay, 1994). Interdisciplinary approach is also related to the externalization of design thinking; such an act enables the exchange of information and knowledge in the early stage of designing where critical decision are taken, and thus facilitates the design process itself (J. C. Jones, 1992).…”

“…The creative ability of designers to conceive novel ideas and their capacity to apprehend the human and technical dimensions of a design are significant qualifications justifying their valuable position in a network of design interactions. On the other hand, a designer, as any other expert of a discipline, must overcome the narrow margins of a one-discipline focus in order to produce a successful, in many terms, design outcome (Eppinger et al, 1990) (Skinner et al, 1999). The organisational scheme that is produced by the collaboration of many disciplines, where different methodologies of problem solving are integrated together supplementing the set of genuine undertakings, results to a more comprehensive design solution compared to the one accomplished when each discipline elaborates in its own.…”

Interdisciplinary Team Projects With Marketing Students To Improve Engineering Capstone Experience

“…20 Methodology Table 1 shows the number of students by discipline participating in the first two years of the collaborative project. 21 At the end of the engineering/marketing collaboration each year, students were given an evaluation form designed to assess their perceptions and the effectiveness of the experience. Engineering student evaluation forms had slightly different wording than the marketing student forms to accurately address the differing concerns of the two perspectives.…”