Convergence and interdisciplinary design practice

When I was asked to sign up for a "convergence module" back in December, I didn't have a clue what this was supposed to be. The 4 week and 6 credits module had a number of sub-modules to choose from. I picked an interesting sounding module entitled "Geo Visuals". It was run by the "Scientific Visualisation" course and apparently was about visualisations of geographic data. It sounded intriguing, so I signed up. Now this module had kept me busy for 4 weeks and I'm pleased with the result.



The whole module was basically about interdisciplinary design practice ie. students of the whole department of design could try out fields that are outside of their usual area of specialism. The module was accompanied by a number of lectures held by international guests from other universities and the from industry. The lectures were concerned with convergence in the widest sense, ranging from convergence design to convergence of disciplines or convergence of media etc. Within the different sub-moduls or courses we could choose a specific project, team up with other students or come up with our own project. The outcomes were presented to the whole department and also uploaded to a blog so everyone could check out what the other students were doing.



I teamed up with an Interaction Design/Game Design student and chose to work on a live brief for the project "BiodiverCity", a national research project that involves the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, the University of Berne and the Urban Ecology & Wildlife Research Group. The aim was to visualise research data connected to a recent study of biodiversity in urban spaces.



The final result was presented as a video sequence to the whole department of design and followed by an apero, as you might expect. Yes, free beer and wine from the uni to celebrate students hard work and success. Kind of what they tried once last semester, when they offered us chocolate—just for adults.*



It was a very enjoyable module and I met a bunch of new people from disciplines that I previously didn't know much about but I'm glad that I had the chance to get to know them.



And what exactly we did in this project, will be published here soon.

* I'm not complaining about the chocolates at all but maybe suggesting that a social event, where people automatically start discussing what was good or not so good, seems be the cleverer incentive.