Carol Gill is an Assistant Professor in Industrial Design and has been with the Department for over four years.  In presenting her research to professional and educational forums, Carol has discovered exciting new places in the course of sharing her vision for the future of interdisciplinary design research with colleagues around the world. 

What is your research focus in the area of industrial design?

Integrating design and engineering methods for idea generation, analysis, and tools in order to facilitate a greater level of collaboration between the two disciplines during the design process.

Engineers tend to be results-based when solving problems and rely heavily on past outcomes.  One of their primary objectives during the design process is to minimize the amount of biased judgment and to produce consistent outcomes. Designers, on the other hand, have a tendency to rely more on intuition and to substantiate their solutions on future events.

Both approaches are critical for the development and implementation of innovative solutions – they are fundamentally different, but can be complimentary. There is a need to educate both designers and engineers on how each discipline works, thinks, and communicates, and how each can benefit from a better understanding of how the other discipline sees and does design.

Which issues do you feel are still largely unexplored in the overall design community today?

Sustainable development has been at the center of inquiry in the design community for quite some time. One issue that seems to be overlooked within that subject is the fact that a product cannot really be “sustainable” if it is not embedded in a system that supports it.  Too often designers define a product as “sustainable” when it reflects at least one of these principles: low-impact materials, energy efficiency, quality and durability, design for reuse and recycling, service substitution, and renewability. Unfortunately, these characteristics are not sufficient for the product to actually behave in a sustainable way. It doesn’t matter if a product is made from bio-degradable plastic if it ends its life in a landfill. We have to find a way to develop and support sustainable product systems, not just products.

The need for interdisciplinary collaboration in this field is absolutely critical for our future as a civilization – issues such as energy scarcity and global climate change are real, and they’re not going to go away if we stick our heads in the sand. Designers need to work with engineers, for example, to better understand issues like reduced energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, more eco–friendly materials, and most importantly the systems that surround those issues. At the same time, engineers need designers to help them create products that will actually appeal to people in the marketplace, and also will respond to real user needs. And both designers and engineers need to do a much better job communicating with business and marketing people, lawyers, and politicians, if we’re going to actually create viable solutions to these problems.

In what ways do you feel interdisciplinary research benefits the design community? 

As I’ve already noted, all of the issues around sustainability are inherently interdisciplinary. I mentioned engineering specifically, because I work closely with engineering professors here at Ohio State, but there are many other fields as well – psychology, anthropology, biology, ecology, chemistry, to name a few – that also have a big role to play here.

Currently all my graduate advisees have either interdisciplinary backgrounds or are pursuing an interdisciplinary education. Two of them are also in the college of engineering. I like to expose all of them to each other and also to the undergraduate design students. They are currently involved with the senior ID class in a project for an international competition. Their input in the class has been very valuable and I also believe that they have benefited from the exchange. All my graduate students see the value of being “in between” disciplines. 

What challenges exist for introducing interdisciplinary research into the university setting?

It is sometimes challenging to collaborate on campus because of the barriers between disciplines and because the current budget model does not support interdisciplinary course offerings.  All interdisciplinary collaborations I have participated in have been on a volunteer basis because they require faculty across campus to commit the time in addition to their departmental teaching loads.  Federal funding is also difficult to secure because the government is not specifically supporting interdisciplinary research and some skepticism still exists from the “old school” research perspective.

What forums have you used to share your work?

We’ve found that the European design community is very responsive to product design and engineering in the same context. We’ve presented our work at several conferences; the Institution of Engineering Designers and the Design Society in Europe and also in Asia. Last year one of our papers won the “Best Paper” award at the International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education conference in Salzburg, Austria. It seems more challenging to get acceptance from the “design” community or the “engineering” community inside the US as our subject doesn’t fall clearly on one side or the other. We continue to pursue both sides of the spectrum as we see gradual changes in both fields.

How do you feel your personal interests and past experiences have influenced your work or given you a unique perspective?

Being a woman designer from a developing country has given me a different outlook on things. When I moved to the US several years ago, I wanted to blend in with everyone else. I never was able to accomplish that, but as I learned more about the American culture I was able to reflect on my own. Having insights from both has allowed me to perceive and assess situations from an advantageous perspective not only at a personal level, but also professionally. A few years ago, I was assigned to teach foundation courses with a group of architecture faculty to an interdisciplinary group of students at Georgia Tech. I had a very similar “cultural challenge” and realized how much I learned about both fields while experiencing those challenges. Now I seek situations in which I am the “in between” person in the group and I try to encourage our students to do the same.