I’ve now been teaching full-time at Chalmers (a Swedish university) for 6 months. I’ve been teaching courses in both interaction design and software engineering. Most of the courses I teach are directed either towards design students or software engineering students, resulting in project work where all students have similar skills and background knowledge. However, in one of the courses I’m teaching (Agile methods), there is a good blend of students from different backgrounds, including interaction design, software engineering, IT, and game design & development.
I think this blend of multidisciplinary students collaborating on practical projects is absolutely great. Just as in a real-world context, students from different backgrounds can contribute with their own specialized skills and perspectives. I can see how they’re immediately functioning similarly to multidisciplinary teams in startups and motivating each other. I can also see how they’re helping each other learn new ways of thinking that might not have been covered in their own educational paths before.
Seeing this, I think we as educators should try to facilitate more technical education that brings together students from diverse backgrounds. It’s extremely valuable for students to learn from each other and gain insights into knowledge from other educational fields. Ideally, I’d even like to see students collaborating across programs and subjects. For example, it would be really cool to facilitate collaboration with students from design, software engineering, machine learning, healthcare, economics, sustainability, arts, philosophy, and so forth. This would most likely require a lot of coordination, but I think it’s a really valuable thing for society.
What if many of the pressing problems we have today, with the environment and sustainability, with technological overdependence and social media addiction, democracy and free speech, disinformation, and much more, could find their solutions by diversifying student backgrounds? The students we have today will be the ones who will go out into the world to build new products, companies, and innovations. Some of those things will be harmful for the planet and society, but what if they could be more useful and helpful by expanding students’ perspectives before they even graduate?