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There's an inherent problem or paradox with many of ways institutions talk about cross- and inter-disciplinary work and breaking down the silos. In the way its usually framed, you can't have interdisciplinary (I'll use this term for now) curricula or projects without having disciplines. The very definition of those disciplines involves building walls and boundaries, i.e. "we're this, we're not that, you're not us". The way out of this, as Nabeel Hamdi has argued, is that you build curricula around overarching themes. So instead of thinking of design for shelters for refugees, which only engages the built environment folk, you have a project based on the needs of refugees, so then you can incorporate everyone from aid and development workers, health workers, designers of all flavours, sociologists, etc., etc. Essentially those projects are transdisciplinary, but I find the terminology muddled here. Where the rubber meets the road in almost all institutions is that they are governed in top-down, command and control fashions, which tends to divide up the faculty and students into manageable chunks and the academy tends to see the best way to do that as dividing by discipline, because that's what has always been done from school through higher ed to research. This means separate budgets, internal competition for resources, in-fighting, timetabling issues, etc., etc. - all of which confound most attempts and these kinds of new curricula, despite the best will in the world from those trying to get them off the ground. The successful projects tend to come out of good personal relationships more than anything at an institutional or structural level. It's only these that really overcome all those other barriers. Academia is excruciatingly slow at engaging in change and change happens at a generational pace, not at the pace of the world around it. I don't really see much of that changing anytime soon until the management of those institutions has a generational shift from those that have successfully risen through the ranks and climbed the highly-structured institutional ladder and understandably see that as the best way to run things (because it got them to where they are) to a generation who have experience professional and personal lives that are much more about flatter, networked structures. Until they expire or retire, not much changes. (I don't mean to be too rude or devalue those people in those positions or be particularly ageist – there are a few very forward thinking people in higher ed management of all ages, but they are the minority frozen in a broken system. It's a system that worked up until about 25 years ago too. Now it doesn't). Cheers, Andy – Hochschule Luzern Design & Kunst Sentimatt 1 | Dammstrasse, CH-6003 Luzern T +41 41 228 54 64, F +41 41 228 56 99 M +49 151 1964 2581 Skype: apolaine Twitter: apolaine http://www.hslu.ch/design-kunst/ Dr. Andy Polaine Forschungsdozent Service Design Research Fellow / Lecturer Service Design T direkt: +41 41 249 92 25 [log in to unmask] Co-author: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/service-design/