Designing a new degree without starting from the subjects

The starting point

I have supported the creation of new university degrees in different contexts. Designing a programme from scratch is one of the few occasions when a university can ask a different question, free from the inertia of what already exists:

What kind of professional and person needs to emerge from this degree?

The tension

University structure naturally tends to start from the other end:

disciplines → departments → subjects → content

It is an understandable sequence — it mirrors how the institution is organised — but it produces degrees that reproduce the university’s internal structure rather than responding to the context the graduate will inhabit.

The question changed

Transformation begins when the sequence can be inverted:

purpose → graduate profile → professional problems and contexts → capabilities → experiences → disciplinary knowledge → curricular architecture

And the central design question becomes:

What must a student live through over several years to progressively become the professional we declare in the graduate profile?

What began to connect

When design starts from the profile and from real problems, interdisciplinarity stops being an ornament and becomes a structural necessity: the problems that define a profession do not respect departmental borders.

Disciplines do not lose with this approach. They keep their depth and gain an additional role: they act as resources for understanding and acting on complex problems. The operational question stops being “which subjects does this plan need” and becomes “which knowledge does the student need to integrate to respond to these contexts”.

Which decisions emerged

In the processes I have supported, this inversion of sequence surfaces decisions the traditional logic never gets to raise:

• Defining the graduate profile as architecture, not as a list of good intentions.
• Designing backbone experiences that cut across years and disciplines.
• Reserving structural space for sustained contact with real professional contexts.
• Aligning assessment with demonstrable capabilities, not only with passed content.

An idea that transcends this case

Designing an interdisciplinary degree is not about juxtaposing subjects from different departments. It is about deliberately building the connections between knowledge, experiences, capabilities and professional contexts.

This story connects with university transformation and with the work on assessment, competencies and evidence.