Preparing students towards the complexity of today's practice : start-up in a multidisciplinary assignment

Education in the Department of the Built Environment (of TU/e) aims to prepare students for multidisciplinary design teams. The Bachelor program offers a broad range incorporating essentials of urbanism, architecture, structure, building physics, real estate, construction, services et cetera. This broad BSc program lays a foundation for students and is followed by a Master program that focuses on specialization. There are six specializations: Architecture, Urban Design & Planning, Structural Design, Building Physics & Services, Real Estate Management & Development and Construction Management & Engineering. Multidisciplinary in the BSc is more than offering a variety of knowledge in courses and lectures. The Department also puts a lot of effort to train students to gain experiences in integral design teams. This takes shape in studios but is best expressed in the Multi-project (a semester assignment in the last year of the Bachelor). This assignment is organized by 9 coaches (from all specializations in the Master). The assessment is always a practice-based issue, and students have to cooperate as a design team during one semester. Developing the Multi-project has been a long route that took place over many years with several adjustments according to experiences and information gathered by student inquiries. This paper gives a very global overview of the present setup to contextualize this assignment. After that, the main part of this paper focuses on the kickoff (first 2-3 weeks). Here students start in parallel studios, meant to put them on track for integral design. Each studio combines two disciplines and compels students to precede design by analyzing all kind of issues in the light of the specific assignment. Because of the complexity of this assignment we frequently ask students to fill in an enquiry. Because of this we are now able to draw conclusions from major changes during the last 10-14 assignments (2007 – 2013).