Analyzing transdisciplinary design processes in industry – an overview

Integrated product design and development in today’s highly competitive, demanding and economically challenging world is a complex process depending upon input of many individuals, groups, organizations and even communities, which collaborate to realize the product. Due to the multi-technology nature of modern products, the design process requires multi-disciplinary resources.
Engineering design literature provides an extensive knowledge base of product design processes, most of which are specific in an explicit or an implicit way to a specific discipline. This is because some time ago, the products were perceived to be rather mono-disciplinary.
Recently, design processes have been described for integrated products from inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary team perspective (e.g.[1]), however, they too take product specific and discipline specific point of view.
This paper takes a transdisciplinary perspective towards product design and presents results from an empirical study carried out to analyze the design process of different integrated products belonging to different disciplines/industrial segments; all of which involve multi-disciplinary or transdisciplinary involvement.
A framework based on key findings from the transdisciplinary consolidation of academic design process models presented by Gericke and Blessing and Eisenbart et al. is developed and used to provide answers to the following research questions:
• How well does the literature based trans-disciplinary design process apply to the trans-disciplinary industrial context?
• Are there similarities between design processes across organizations regarding presence of process stages and design states?
• Are there any elements that deviate from the literature-based framework?