Is Design a Plus? A dilemma of disciplines when implementing design into academic education

Universities are increasingly implementing design into their education programmes across the humanities, social science, natural sciences and business schools. Through design, it can therefore be argued that academic education is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, implementing design along with the given academic discipline’s traditional curriculum. With design moving into other disciplines and schools of thought, the question arises as to what types of knowledge contribution can be identified and how can the established schools of thought comprehend a new type of knowledge contribution. In this paper, we will discuss an epistemological dilemma that occurred when implementing design into established humanistic education at Aalborg University, which is a problems-based learning (PBL) university. From our empirical observations, having implemented design into the humanistic curriculum, a series of educational dilemmas arose. We therefore pose, and later discuss, the following question: Can interdisciplinary universities with any fair claim expect their students to both create a constructive design contribution as well as a ‘classic’ academic contribution – or should the constructive design itself be acknowledged as a knowledge contribution?