In 2005, the Cox Review of Creativity in Business argued that the UK needed to exploit its creative capabilities more fully to respond to the growing threat from rapidly emerging economies.
The review put forward several recommendations promoting multi-disciplinarity in higher education as a catalyst for innovation. These included better preparing students to ‘work with and understand other disciplines’ and ‘the establishment of centres of excellence for multi-disciplinary courses that combine management studies, engineering, technology with design and the creative arts’.
For the last five years, the Design Council, working with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and NESTA, has supported a network of academics engaged in developing new multi-disciplinary centres, courses and programmes in response to the Cox Review.
This report summarises the findings from a fact-finding mission to Asia by a delegation of academics and policy makers in April 2010. The delegation visited leading companies, universities and design studios in Beijing, China, and in Seoul and Daejeon, South Korea.
The aim was to learn from existing and developing models of multi-disciplinary education and practice and inform the development of new multi-disciplinary courses and collaborative projects in the UK. A full list of delegates and details of the meetings can be found at the back of this report.
This report adds a further dimension to the findings of previous fact-finding missions to the USA and northern Europe.