Work in progress - disciplinary egocentrism as a barrier to interdisciplinary design

With the complexity of design problems ever increasing with our societal and technological needs, engineers in industry are working on interdisciplinary teams to develop solutions to address these challenges. Interdisciplinary collaboration requires additional skills and knowledge to communicate and negotiate across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In current research on interdisciplinarity, researchers have identified several barriers to successfully crossing disciplinary boundaries, including our previous finding of disciplinary egocentrism, which encompasses (a) ¿relatedness,¿ the (in)ability to relate interdisciplinary subject matter to one´s discipline, and (b) ¿perspective,¿ the (in)ability to identify and value the contributions from multiple disciplines to the interdisciplinary subject. In this paper, we begin to investigate the interaction of disciplinary egocentrism and the phases of design to help faculty identify appropriate contexts for intervention.