At the University of Cincinnati we just completed curriculum redesign to move away from our silos. Our context is that of a co-op school where we are committed to training practitioners: our co-op employers require students that can do design work and this means awareness of whatever silos still exist in the profession. But rather than co-op focusing our education vocationally, it frees us to go deeper with theory and exploration across disciplines. The professional silos take care of themselves. That said, 'permeable silo' designers are being demanded by our professionals.
So we're built our new curriculum of permeable silos around a shared design core.
Specifically, we've revised our foundation year (a cluster of common design courses in the first year), and extended it throughout our five-year curriculum as a set of Design Core courses common to design and a shared collaborative design studio in the fourth (of five) years. Some of the Design Core courses (working from memory) are: Design History/Theory/Criticism; User Centered/Ethnography; Research Methods; Global Issues. The collaborative course noted above is both collaborative across design disciplines, and across other disciplines (medicine and engineering being currently very active), students working in cross-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary teams.
The curriculum was developed by faculty of the School of Design and was approved last Spring unanimously (I feel for John M. at RISD).
Hope this helps someone.
Mike Zender
University of Cincinnati
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