Last month we asked the chairs of 11 leading industrial-design programs to talk to us about the evolution of ID education for our D-School Futures interview series. Since then we've received word of two new master's programs in design that seemed worthy of additional comment. In New York, Parsons is launching an MFA in industrial design—and we'll have an interview with Rama Chorpash about that program in the coming days.

Today, we're checking in on a master's program with a broader, more interdisciplinary focus. The University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art & Design is currently accepting applications for a Master of Design in Integrative Design. It's a two-year program with an interesting approach—the idea is that students with a variety of design backgrounds will work together in teams to invent solutions for a wicked problem that will rotate every few years. The inaugural problem is "wicked healthcare," and Stamps has lined up medical companies, biomedical engineers, surgeons and others to participate in the curriculum.

Recently, we talked to Bruce M. Tharp—a long-time Core77 contributor and a new addition to the Stamps faculty—about the MDes program. The following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Core77: Who is this program for?

Bruce Tharp: We imagine that our ideal candidates are probably industrial designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, interior designers/architects—people in that design space. But we're excited about the possibility of students with other skills sets and proficiencies who also have experienced design in some professional setting. Of course, the program itself is highly cross-disciplinary. There is tremendous integration of non-design information and experts—for the current "wicked healthcare" theme, we have on board medical companies, a children's hospital, biomedical engineers, surgeons, technologists, entrepreneurial faculty and many more who will be integrated into the curriculum.

This idea of designers working to solve big societal problems—is that a career or a profession that exists now, or is it one that you're trying to help create?

The program is what we think is a 21st-century program for 21st-century design. The idea is that these are big, complex problems that are tackled in cross-disciplinary teams, collaboratively, with more of a systems approach. This is the way a lot of designers are now working, and that I would say design is increasingly being asked to work. So this is partly a response to the world and it's also partly a call to the world as well, about what design can do and its potential.

Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a role in the world for what we would call 20th-century design or design education. In graduate education, that really comes from the MFA model, where you're working independently on a thesis project of your choosing, and it's something that you can generally handle in a year. That's a completely valid way of working and there are lots of applications for that kind of work, but increasingly designers are being asked to do more.

Design has a lot of visibility now, and other disciplines are saying, "Wow, what if we could use design in this way?" So the program is inviting design into more complex arenas. I think designers are really uniquely positioned to work on these wicked problems, but it demands that we be educated in a different way.Why is healthcare the perfect wicked problem for the launch of this program?

Well, we're really thinking about it as healthcare and well-being—and we think that's very relevant and just incredibly important and powerful in the world. We also have these amazing resources on campus to work on it. As a new faculty member, I am blown away by what is on offer here. There is such an appetite for collaborative work. A lot of that is coming from biomedical engineering, and we have a relationship with the children's hospital, as well as a host of other medical-device companies that we have worked with in conjunction with the business school, mechanical engineering and various doctors—so it was a natural connection.

Images from the MDes in Integrative Design brochure

The American healthcare system certainly does not lack for problems. How do you even begin to get students to tackle such an enormously complex issue?

It's really, really challenging. And we're not sugarcoating the complexity and the difficulty of doing this. We're really embracing the messiness of it.

Something that I'm particularly interested in with the program, and that I want to emphasize, is that I think it could be read as this very human-centered, rational, ultra-pragmatic program. But what I'm interested in is the possibility for pushing a lot of boundaries. We're very pluralistic in the sense that we want students who come from different backgrounds and who have different motivations as well. So while we will have a corporate affiliation, that doesn't mean it's this purely commercial program. We're interested in the experimentation, the exploration, the discovery—whether as an outcome or as part of the design process itself. I'm excited about how that gets into the mix, especially the experimentation and discursiveness that you wouldn't necessarily expect when you're working with surgeons and biomedical engineers and huge international medical corporations.

I imagine that a graphic designer coming to this program is going to have a very different experience than an industrial designer or an interior designer. Is the program very individualized in a way?

Individualized but also team-based—so it's that relationship between individual expertise and team goals. I think the best way to think about it is that it's like a design studio. So, for example, I worked for Haworth in their Ideation Group. I was the anthropologist, and we had an ergonomist, a cognitive psychologist, an interiors specialist and a multimedia expert all working together. And it was very rich and exciting. You're unified in certain ways, but you each have a different expertise that you bring to the team. For me, that was a 21st-century job. And it was very similar to how we're thinking about this program.

So, yeah, if you're a graphic designer and you want to design, say, the hospital bed of the future, that may not be feasible for you. Because, are you going to learn all of this cross-disciplinary work in addition to learning how to work in 3D at full scale on large objects? No. But what you will do is understand how to be a good team member and how to contribute your skills and vision to the overall goal, and how to lead these teams as well.

But, also, we don't know 100 percent what's going to happen until the team gets together. Because the projects will be generated by the interests of the students. And that's what makes it exciting for me as well.