Integrating students through a multidisciplinary design project

Design as a multidisciplinary endeavour needs to be reflected in learning and teaching strategies within higher education. This paper discusses a design project where quantity surveying (QS) and architecture students worked together on a proposal for a prototype Almshouse for the 21st century. The two groups of students worked alongside a client, and members of the local community, integrating context and content through one design project in an attempt to break down perceived professional and educational silos. The project and learning processes were recorded through student feedback, module evaluation and workshop observation. The project exposed both sets of students to each other’s disciplines, where the architecture students were engaged with the budget and the QS students were engaged in the design process. The authors discuss their experience of delivering this particular multidisciplinary project and how the experience might influence a future curriculum involving integration of disciplines and the use of live projects in built environment education. As such this paper focuses less on the physical outcomes of the project, and more on the ongoing dialogues within built environment education that talk of multi and interdisciplinary approaches to design, how they might be more readily adopted through learning and teaching strategies, and the challenges this approach continues to represent for higher education.