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Creating New Identities in Design Education
Hannah Rose Mendoza, Claudia Bernasconi and Nora M. MacDonald

Abstract
An international education opportunity has been created for design students at West Virginia University. This experience is unique because it takes an interdisciplinary approach to design that exposes students to the idea of a larger design methodology common to design professions. Students take core courses with students from a variety of design fields, including interior design, fashion design, fashion merchandising, landscape architecture, art, and graphic design. Through this interaction, students gain an understanding of the interrelationships among design fields, learn to appreciate new perspectives, …ver más…

Through continuing interaction, all ‘living systems incorporate elements of their context into themselves, such that the product of their process is their own self-organization’ [2]. It is the quality of those interactions that determine the strength of the community as an agent. As Claudio Magris said, ‘every identity is also a horror, because it owes its existence to tracing a border and rebuffing whatever is on the other side’ [3]. If we do not seek new information, intersections and interactions outside of our discipline we lose valuable assets in the struggle to confront that horror. It is through these intersections that ‘we learn to look at what we previously took for granted from a different perspective’ [4]. Theoretical framework Interdisciplinary programme opportunities are important given the struggles for recognition in which many design professions are engaged in academic and professional communities. Domi-

nance and recognition achieved through conquest and control is historically a masculine approach [5]. A feminist critique of interdisciplinary education encourages questioning the dominant methodologies and techniques of validation. Interdisciplinary collaboration and the opening of boundaries between design professions results in a stronger collective value placed in each profession than can be garnered through closing boundaries and drawing lines around territories. This project can be