Design and Interdisciplinarity: the improbable introduction of " fundamental physics " in a design school

Résumé En

This paper analyzes the introduction of fundamental physics in design education as a pedagogical method that brings interdisciplinarity into play. It presents the framework of three workshops that took place in a design school. For each workshop, a theme was chosen by the designers and the professor of physics: superconductivity in 2011, quantum physics in 2013 and light and optics in 2014. The authors suggest that introducing physics in a design curriculum was thought in terms of an “a fortiori” education program that would help practitioners to draw pertinent questions and responses whatever the situation. The authors suggest therefore that the curriculum had five goals that correspond to a model of design: affective (how to cope with uncertainty), reflexive learning (how to cope with processes rather than contents), cognitive (how to cope with non knowledge), economic (how to cope with the industrial society of innovation), and political (how to cope with the equality of disciplines and “indiscipline”).