Collaborative Practice within Distinctive Curriculum Structure: Arts and Sciences Partnerships Towards New Project Development: A Project-Based Approach

There have been many approaches to extend innovative teaching & learning and supporting student engagement and interaction, from online video tutorials, to flipped-delivery, to live interactive projects. This collaborative project seeks to improve student engagement by encouraging true cooperative practice between two distinctive programmes and curriculums, with subject specific learning outcomes, but a shared interest in producing a developed project and physical product outcomes dependent on each of these specialism inputs.

Building on self-initiated and shared learning, critical evaluation and analysis within the stages of a formalised design process, focus is directed at bringing an element of realism to a formulated module structure. Developing student’s readiness for graduate life has always been a challenge for any University programme; limited availability of industry opportunities results in small numbers of students gaining collaborative experience.

Within a three-year programme at university, students predominately engage at an academic level with their peers studying on the same or similar programmes and subjects and certainly only within the same college. However, employability thrives on interdisciplinarity, variety of skills and an ability to communicate and share ideas with people of differing educational and skills backgrounds. As such, the aim of this project is to further develop the ability to research, generate and communicate new ideas in a professional and societal context and develop knowledge into practice in a shared project framework; essentially a mix of an arts-based creative discipline with a science-based knowledge skills discipline. Product Design students working with Computer Science students.

Students studying Product Design work alongside programme staff to explore new ways of developing products for identified and emerging markets by engaging with novel ways that traditional and new technologies can be developed and applied in emerging societal scenarios, which highlight and address everyday issues experienced by everyday people. Students then recruit (via a presentation pitch) undergraduate programme partners from Computer Science to develop and realise these concepts into working prototypes. These prototypes are then targeted to investors and possible 'kickstarter' projects. This conjoining of specialist subject areas allows students to step out of their ‘comfort zones’ to collaborate and work with students from different subject areas.

Key questions include:
- The impact of collaborative practice between subject disciplines, which apply specialist skills and practice to develop real world products for commercial testing at live trade events.
- The impact of collaborative practice in reality, between subject disciplines, which share creative and skills-based project outcomes, whilst pursuing individual subject learning outcomes. Is ‘true’ collaboration possible between distinctive subject disciplines?
- What practice models can be developed and applied in order to facilitate additional learning project management skills and sharing of practice between student groups from identified subject disciplines?