Design futures: the grid - a transdisciplinary education

This paper considers the potential and importance of a transdisciplinary approach to design education. It discusses the framework necessary for such an approach to succeed, one which allows engagement across traditional disciplines. To this end it proposes the concept of the Generative Research Interface Device or Grid. As a conceptual generative design tool, the Grid provides means by which meta-concepts of practice can be mapped and understood, but which at the same time can be flexible and adaptive to the particular design task at hand. The paper proposes this concept in the context of the creation of a design course at the University of Brighton, one which offers a truly transdisciplinary framework. The paper presents four case studies from the seemingly distinct feelds of coding, interior architecture, 3D design and narrative. The Grid reveals and generates connections between these, suggesting an underlying network of issues around reuse and generative form through which design concepts and propositions emerge. We conclude that such a programme of study is not a weakening of specialisms, but instead of profits from the effects of its transdisciplinarity and brings a new sense of what a designer is educated to become.