Researching multi-disciplinary teams in action
In 2008, Kingston was awarded £250,000 from HEFCE for a two-year initiative to develop ‘Innoversity’, a cross-faculty project to investigate how multi-disciplinary teams from design, business and technology backgrounds collaborate to solve problems. Postgraduate students from Kingston University’s multi-disciplinary ‘creative economies’ Masters courses are at the heart of the project, which is a longitudinal study on multi-disciplinary team-working and aims to transfer research knowledge into the teaching of Kingston’s multi-disciplinary courses.
Multi-disciplinary teaching and learning
Kingston offers a suite of Masters in Creative Economy (MACE) courses. Launched in September 2007, these multi-disciplinary, one-year full-time (two-year part-time) courses cover five areas of study: Built Environment, Design Industries, Heritage and Visual Arts, Performing Arts, and Media. These courses are directed by the Faculty of Business and Law in partnership with the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
A cohort of 40 students is currently enrolled on the MACE courses. Their backgrounds range widely, and alongside fashion designers with 20 years industry experience, there are copywriters, artists, music technicians, marketing managers and recruitment consultants. More than 80% of the students come from outside the UK. Alongside taught modules which cover contemporary issues in the creative economy, leadership skills, techniques and tools, students begin the course by creating, designing and managing a viable creative enterprise project using their own funds as capital and working in mixed teams.
MACE students
Kingston’s twenty Masters courses in Creative Industries & the Creative Economy see students from a range of backgrounds including designers, copywriters, artists and music technicians
Researching multi-disciplinary teams
Kingston University has developed purpose-built spaces that encourage multi-disciplinary teamwork and networking, focusing especially on enhancing links between design and innovation. The Innoversity space within the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture was specifically designed to aid the observation and video recording of multi-disciplinary teamwork,
with cameras and sound recording equipment to capture the interaction between teams from design, business, and social science.
It was originally envisaged that the problems the postgraduate students would tackle would come from within the University but eventually be generated by external companies (One early project saw a designer, marketer and a materials scientist work with nursing staff from St George’s Hospital to rapidly prototype a new heat and moisture-retaining plastic pouch for pre-term babies in maternity wards). Over the past year, it is the way in which the students on the MACE courses work together on their live creative enterprise projects which has been the subject of study.
Innovation, design and technology are all flowing into one another to form a single river of roaring change radically altering our culture, and especially our business culture. Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week
Along with the blogs that every student on the Master’s courses use to reflect on the design thinking process and their team’s progress, the videos of these teams working together gives Kingston a rich archive of data on multi-disciplinary team-working which will be written up by researchers and and continually used over the coming year. Part of the Innoversity team is a Psychology researcher who is adding to the research mix by profiling students’ learning styles and comparing the behaviours of the multi-disciplinary teams. Innoversity has already received international interest in this research data archive, including from an Australian professor who will visit Kingston to make further study of the data later in 2010.
Student enterprise and business engagement
In addition to the Innoversity research staff, the Innoversity space houses a Business Development Manager and an Employability Co-ordinator as well as an Enterprise Education Centre which acts as a Creative Business incubator support.
Health Care Challenge
An Innoversity project to prototype a new heat and moisture-retaining plastic pouch for pre-term babies in maternity wards used a multidiscipline team for rapid idea generation