Dancing with ambiguity design thinking in interdisciplinary engineering education

This paper studies two master -level project courses in two universities that use design thinking processes and problem-based learning as the main educational approach in the courses in question. One of the courses has been under development since 1969 and another one was launched during 2012. Both are interdisciplinary and multicultural by nature and have an ill-defined and open-ended real-life problem setting. In this paper we examine the two courses impact on the learning results concerning working life skills such as communication skills, teamwork, design thinking, problem solving and an entrepreneurial mindset. We also seek to understand how these findings relate to design thinking and problem-based learning theories. For data gathering we used semi-structured interviews, study journals and surveys. The data is analyzed and first divided into themes, which are then further analyzed. Research method is close to grounded theory. Altogether 15 alumni and 10 students were interviewed from three different nationalities. We can conclude that in both course structures the students go through a significant learning process that involves learning from the areas of: 1. Communications, team dynamics, cross-cultural, and multiple disciplinarity2. Self-discovery, personal growth and team based group work3. Design process, prototyping, testing and decision-making4. Attitude for failing, entrepreneurshipThe depth and intensity of the learning process is closely linked to the commitment and time spent in the course. These findings are the same irrespective which of the courses is in question. There are clear differences as well. The understanding of the need for pragmatic prototyping and tolerance towards ambiguity is greater in other of the courses, namely the older one. This can be partly explained by more tested coaching methods and more mature structure of the course. This research is limited to student and teacher perspective of the learning results mentioned above. Industry, university administration and other stakeholder opinions and perspectives are not in the scope of this paper. One limiting factor for the analysis is also the fact that all of the authors are somehow linked in to the courses in question.