Why Transdisciplinary Design?

Five learnings of a personal journey on how to design for our complex world.

Two weeks ago, I received my degree in Transdisciplinary Design, a Master in Fine Arts from Parsons School for Design in New York. Even though I spent a great deal of time immersed in studio work over the last two years of my life, it’s still somewhat difficult to explain what “TransD” really is — or what it represents.

Fresh out of the oven, TransD is in its 6th year and is one out of 4 Masters born within the also newly born School of Design Strategies within Parsons. There are only around 17 of us every year, cherry-picked from all parts of the globe, coming from the most diverse cultural and professional backgrounds you can imagine. From an Iraqi graphic designer to an American philosopher, from a Korean product designer to a Brazilian marketer (aka, myself), we all seemed to have come to this program united by something that perhaps we couldn’t really put into words. Still, deep in our hearts and minds, we knew what it was.

According to our faculty, Transdisciplinary Design is about tackling humanity’s grand problems, which require more than a single discipline to solve. However, during my time there, this definition gained not only multiple versions or interpretations but also proved to live way beyond this…