Design process commonalities in trans-disciplinary design

Contemporary product development has transformed from being mono-disciplinary to increasingly trans-disciplinary. Technology convergence and specialization of the knowledge are two distinctive trends that have become pronounced. These two trends are implicitly visible on a cross-disciplinary interaction level in industry. However, trans-disciplinary design has not been considered sufficiently in earlier work on design methodology.
This paper presents results from an empirical study to identify shared elements of current design practice in industry and identification of transdisciplinary elements of product development. A framework based on key findings from the transdisciplinary consolidation of academic design process models presented by Gericke and Blessing (2012) and Eisenbart et al. (2011) 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 commonalities between design processes across organisations regarding presence of process stages, design states, and the form of the process model?