Transdisciplinary Design Thinking and Learning from Nature

This chapter looks at transdisciplinarity in two ways. Firstly, a collaborative project to prompt discussion for transdisciplinary working is expanded upon, and an exploration of terms and relationships is made. Terms and principles are discussed between two schools at Aalto University and then generalised. They are represented by emerging concepts of transdisciplinary work. It is proposed that the arising concepts could apply to different transdisciplinary contexts, with appropriate terms drawn from consideration of those contexts. Secondly, we explore the connections with nature that emerge from Part I. We consider the shapes of adaptive evolution, the ‘engineering’ of nature, as a naturally transdisciplinary avenue for study in art and design and one which challenges us in our approach to design thinking generally. Our metaphors are often machine-based because we made these machines. That nature and living things are not machines is crucial both to this book and to learning from life and life processes.