The real practice of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) is based on collaboration among disciplines [1]. The design of buildings has a level of complexity that makes it unexpectable for the architect alone to integrate all building design aspects [2]. In addition, the implementation of AEC’s projects, which are usually complicated and large in scale, requires interaction among stakeholders from different disciplines: architects, clients, users, and engineers [3]. Hence, the AEC industry continues to seek graduates that possess interdisciplinary collaboration and communication skills [3]. Nevertheless, a great effort is still needed to address the needs and challenges of the current interdisciplinary education [1]. A recent study that targeted 100 fresh graduates and senior students was conducted aiming to find what are today’s needed competencies for architecture students to be employed in the Egyptian market. Khodeir and Nessim concluded that the current architectural education rarely helps students to acquire the skills related to teamwork, such as active listening, communication, leadership, and conflict resolution [4]. Accordingly, filling such education-to-practice gap requires graduation of well-qualified students equipped with teamwork and interdisciplinary skills [5].
The term “Interdisciplinary” is an adjective that describes the interaction that occurs among two or more disciplines. Such interaction is broader than “multi-disciplinary” teamwork or collaboration, which are considered as one-discipline-based terms [6]. According to Borrego and Cutler, multi-disciplinarity is less integrative than interdisciplinarity. The latter is more suitable for engineering projects, as it requires high integration among the involved members from different disciplines to develop a synthesized product [7]. Although it has been found that interdisciplinary works are common in engineering practice and education, they however are almost rarely adopted in current architectural schools [8].
In essence, building an interdisciplinary course combining architecture and engineering is a challenge due to the pedagogical differences between the two pillars: architecture and engineering [9]. To overcome such challenge, many educators call for the adoption of Problem-Based Learning approach as a teaching strategy [10]. However, the Project-Based Learning approach, carried out in the design studio, has been introduced to be more valuable in engineering programs [11, 12]. They are also known as Capstone Courses, which are prepared to integrate students’ previous coursework into a comprehensive, team-based course [13]. Above all, collaboration among educators from architecture and other involved disciplines is the key factor for the successful construction of such courses [9].
Various attempts at interdisciplinary approaches in design education were made since the late 1980s [14]. Two significant papers reviewed a number of studies that addressed such attempts [1, 14]. Firstly, Irizarry et al. analyzed various academic institutions that adopted the AEC collaborative and interdisciplinary pedagogical models from 1995 to 2009. They found that such models have yielded positive results. Nevertheless, they argued that these contributions were not sufficient to comprehensively study interdisciplinarity in education since they had limited tests and applications [1]. Secondly, Kalyanaraman et al. reviewed another list of studies relevant to the interdisciplinary curriculum in AEC. They referred to the growth of attention in AEC interdisciplinary education from the 1990s, as their timeline shows that studies before 1990s addressed interdisciplinarity in general, while those after the 1990s were specialized in the AEC sector [14].
However, limited attempts have addressed the pedagogical challenges to undergraduate interdisciplinary courses [9]. A part of such studies has addressed theoretical basics while the other part has recorded application attempts in design studios. Firstly, Smith has introduced an early attempt at addressing an AEC capstone course, ending up describing the best practices of creation of interdisciplinary teams, projects, assignments, students’ critique, and grading [13]. Grading students in such courses has been considered a challenge. This is due to not only the subjectivity manner in the architectural design studio, but also the interdisciplinarity itself. Team-based assessment is a complicated issue that is hard to resolve, because each student’s grade is based on his/her team performance [15]. Ghonim has offered a framework for interdisciplinary graduation projects, showing that each student from a particular specialization has his/her own Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) and can be easily evaluated, while all students are still able to engage in and solve real-life problems [8]. Solonsky and Parfitt have published a significant paper that provides an expanding theoretical basis of how to construct an AEC capstone program [16]. They have described trends and successes of 9 years of experience in offering such programs. They have also summarized the best practices for future implementation. Such practices however need to be tested by other programs and courses.
A recent study has adopted an experimental course of an AEC interdisciplinary design [17]. After selecting a pilot project with a limited scope of design, Ali has designed a case study of three different programs: the architecture, building construction, and construction management and engineering. The students were requested to design building systems including mechanical and lighting-electrical systems, which however was not at the core of their specialties. It could be more beneficial to involve students from mechanical and electrical departments, who had the technical expertise that is not covered in architecture and construction curricula.
The present study attempts to further expand the literature on interdisciplinary design education, offering an alternative model for collaborative teaching, mainly in the architecture department, and with the involvement of related engineering departments, i.e., structural, electrical, and mechanical engineering departments. The authors hypothesize that architecture students working on an interdisciplinary project would understand the nature of AEC interdisciplinary design knowledge, better than if working on a traditional project-based design studio.
The objective of this paper is to highlight the value of interdisciplinary design studio employed as an elective course in the architecture department, in addition to test the hypothesis, through a designed case study of instructors and senior students from different departments. It is worth mentioning that the meant interdisciplinary design course is that by which students from different disciplines participate in the design, get critiqued, and graded by an interdisciplinary team of academicians and experts. It is different from the traditional mono-discipline courses that provide a background about other disciplines’ knowledge and that are restricted to only architecture instructors and students.