Transdisciplinary collaboration as a vehicle for collective intelligence: A case study of engineering design education

The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new transdisciplinary collaborative research process model to develop collective intelligence through input from research teams as well as academic and non-academic experts. The paper discusses the need for new types of collaboration to solve complex problems and reviews the development of transdisciplinary approaches and collective intelligence. The paper proposes a transdisciplinary collaborative research process composed of three parts: (1) team building and collaborative problem understanding; (2) development of collective intelligence through interpretive structural modeling to classify the problem factors according to driving power and dependence, and (3) use of design structure matrices for transdisciplinary assessment and knowledge integration to form project teams. The proposed process model is illustrated through an example of a rural eco-village system of systems (SoS) drawn from the context of a senior capstone design course.