Transdisciplinary Engineering Projects: Creating an approach to identify the levels of disciplinarity.

Abstract

The aim of the research presented in this thesis was to create an approach to identify the levels of disciplinarity which occur during the development process of transdisciplinary engineering projects. A transdisciplinary approach is usually required in projects where the complexity requires a holistic and evolving approach that transcend disciplines. A transdisciplinary approach can be characterised by integration of knowledge and perspectives from different disciplines and stakeholders to achieve societal value. Within this thesis, the need for differentiating different disciplinary levels of working and a process of developing a disciplinary framework to facilitate this are presented. A literature review suggests a lack of established systems for evaluating levels of disciplinarity used in transdisciplinary projects. This is a barrier to the potential adoption of transdisciplinary ways of working. The main objective of this research is to create an approach to evaluate the levels of disciplinary working used across the stages of the development process in transdisciplinary engineering projects.
The output of this research is an evidence-based framework of disciplinarity that provides the first holistic approach to evaluating the disciplinarity of engineering projects. This is this research’s main contribution to existing knowledge by providing means to identify patterns in the levels of disciplinarity across the product development process.
This research was completed during the national lockdown period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK all but essential workers were required to stay at home. Due to this unprecedented context, the research used the opportunity of evaluating transdisciplinary projects that occurred to meet the societal needs arising from Covid-19 and a case study of six pandemic related transdisciplinary engineering projects was utilised. Using 30 semi-structured interviews, focus was on participant interactions, decision-making, shared understanding, and group processes; this empirical data was triangulated using project documentation and team communications to create a disciplinary framework evaluation tool.
The creation and description of the tool is presented, along with an evaluation of its transferability for use with non COVID-19 projects. The results of this evaluation demonstrate that the disciplinary framework approach was usable and facilitated the assessment of the disciplinarity of engineering projects in both contexts.
Future research looks to build on and progress this research by investigating industry uptake of the proposed approach.

Date of Award	4 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Linda Newnes (Supervisor), Emily Carey (Supervisor) & Vimal Dhokia (Supervisor)