ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

Project Team:

• Nurliyana Daros - Interdisciplinary Collaborative Core Office, NTU
• Dr Mark Pope - Change Makers, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, Imperial 
• Dr Edson Kieu - Nanyang Business School, NTU

Collaboration and Themes

In this last academic year, the Change Makers team at Imperial College and the Interdisciplinary Collaborative Core Office at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) collaborated on an educational project on health and sustainability design. Drawing on their expertise, project leaders Nurliyana Daros and Dr Mark Pope, chose the themes of health and sustainability to inspire ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ to tackle pressing transdisciplinary challenges with innovative thinking.

Workshops and Approaches

Throughout the autumn and spring terms, undergraduate ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ participated in a series of online design workshops. Participants worked in teams with ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ from both universities, following soft-systems methodology and human-centred design. 

A New Health & Sustainability Design Toolkit

The project leaders developed a new health and sustainability design toolkit for the workshops.  This toolkit includes tools for researching, ideating, and developing design proposals - specifically tailored to help ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ engage with a design process on transdisciplinary issues, and drawing from different approaches. It will also be utilised in future teaching and design challenges.

Project Insights and Impact

Participant engagement

Throughout the year, more than 50 undergraduates from Imperial College and NTU, and five guest speakers took part. Seven ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ acted as peer facilitators and were given the title of ‘co-learners’. ‘Co-learners’ were tagged to a group comprising a mix of ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ from both universities. Co-learners and project leaders collaborated in the facilitation of workshop discussions, and conducted regular debriefs to actively identify areas of success and improvement. Reflective sessions were also held in the summer term to evaluate their experiences and gather insights for future improvement.

Creative problem solving

One strong finding from the evaluations revealed that ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ enhanced their capacity for creative problem solving and thinking ‘outside of the box’. Students professed to better appreciate the diverse potential solutions to complex, transdisciplinary issues.

International collaboration

Participants highly valued the opportunity of working with staff and ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ from London and Singapore. They emphasised the importance of learning to co-create and work collaboratively across cultures and disciplines. 

I would love to see more collaboration between different universities, with different cultures, with different working styles. It's so beneficial for ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ - Imperial student

Student leadership and teamwork

Participants also underlined how they developed core teamwork and leadership skills. Specifically, they highlighted how they had nurtured different types of leadership and facilitation skills – aligned with a co-creative, inclusive approach. The co-learners learned to facilitate group work, adapt to group dynamics, and promote deeper discussions while ensuring everyone could contribute. The project’s design-a-thon competition further demonstrated participants’ teamwork, with groups actively listening to different viewpoints, contributing ideas and coordinating efforts to prepare for the pitch. Going forward, staff will be exploring this potential further.

I have learned much from the seminars conducted and working with peers from other universities such as Imperial has allowed me to gain fresh perspectives and thought processes related to both design process and problem-solving which I might otherwise not come up on. I believe it would be great to have similar events in which NTU ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ work alongside ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ from other universities, especially those outside of Asia as it would allow for us to become global ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ and learn more about other regions beyond the books -NTU student

Student designs

Student teams submitted their design proposals in a design challenge competition, the design-a-thon.  The winning entry, “Wonky Bites,” impressed an international judging panel. “Wonky Bites” is a veggie-box scheme offering rejected produce from early supply chain stages to ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½. The veggie-box contains sensors that trigger an alarm if temperature or humidity levels exceed a preset range.

Overall, this project highlights the promise of innovative, collaborative educational initiatives that offer enablers for transdisciplinary teaching and learning.