Thank you to the Chair and faculty in the Department of Design at Sacramento State University for inviting me to deliver their keynote lecture as part of the annual arts celebration. I enjoyed meeting the students and an audience of about 150 people. The paper I gave was called Interdisciplinary Design: Connecting Ideas, Shaping Experiences.
I stressed that I never thought of design as anything but interdisciplinary and that my career reflects this belief. Here were my three key takeaways for the audience:
- Design functions as an interdisciplinary practice – design can be combined with any other discipline, this is its strength
- Courses should be designed to support interdisciplinary exploration – open ended, graded differently, not only rewarding technical skills
- The future of the design field depends on interdisciplinary thinking – think AI and we are all going to have to be adaptable and flexible
