Multidisciplinary design projects among both engineering and humanities studies

Since 1996, third and fourth year students at the University of Twente (UT) have had the opportunity to do multidisciplinary project work in a group of students of at least two other disciplines (engineering as well as humanities). The main learning objective is ||learning to work together with students from other disciplines in the design and realisation of a solution for a complex real world problem||. In most of the projects, an external client is involved so that the students learn how to operate as an engineering or advising company. The purpose of this paper is to share the authors| experiences in this kind of multidisciplinary project work and to discuss the general design of these projects. The results of the evaluation indicate that the project course brings about the desired learning effects in multidisciplinary teams.