Designing new interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary degrees: start with the profile, not the subjects

I have supported the creation of new degrees at universities in several countries, and almost all of them start the same way: someone spots an opportunity — sustainability, data, digital health, creative industries — and a committee is formed.

What happens next determines whether the degree will actually be interdisciplinary or only look that way in the brochure.

Design by aggregation: the usual path (and why it fails)

The typical process works like this: the committee asks each department involved to contribute courses. Engineering brings its own, economics brings its own, design brings its own. Credits are negotiated — credits are territory, and territory is defended — an “integrative project” is added at the end, and a curriculum is approved.

The result is a degree that is multidisciplinary by juxtaposition: the student takes fragments of three disciplines and is expected to do the integration alone, usually in the final year. The courses do not talk to each other because the departments that own them do not either.

This design fails for a structural reason: it was designed from the existing offer, not from the problem the degree answers nor from the professional it wants to educate.

Designing from the profile: the inverse sequence

The design I advocate — and apply with the Systemic Learning Architecture framework — reverses the order:

1. The problem before the title

What real-world problem justifies this degree existing? Not “there is demand for profiles in X”, but: what complex situations will this professional have to address that no single discipline solves alone? If the answer fits inside one discipline, you do not need an interdisciplinary degree: you need a minor.

2. The graduate profile before the curriculum

Define precisely what the graduate must understand, be able to do and be able to decide. Not as a generic list of competencies copied from another accreditation document, but as observable, assessable capabilities anchored in the situations from step 1. This profile is the design contract: everything that comes later is validated against it.

3. The experiences before the subjects

In which learning situations are those capabilities developed? Real problems do not arrive labelled by discipline, and the experiences that prepare for them should not either. This is where integrated case studies appear, challenges with organisations, longitudinal projects that cross years. The right question is not “which subjects do we need” but “which experiences does this student need to live”.

4. The structure in service of the experiences

Only now does it make sense to talk about modules, credits and timetables. And the resulting structure will probably not look like a grid of 6-credit subjects: integrated blocks will appear, protected project time, progressions of complexity.

Interdisciplinary vs. transdisciplinary: a useful distinction

• Interdisciplinary: several disciplines integrate to address a problem; each keeps its methods, but the design forces dialogue. Most new degrees should aspire to at least this.
• Transdisciplinary: the problem organises the knowledge and transcends disciplinary boundaries, incorporating knowledge from outside academia too — professionals, communities, organisations. It is organisationally more demanding and not always necessary, but in fields like sustainability or public health it is where the real value lies.

The usual trap is using these words in the brochure while the structure remains disciplinary. Students detect it within two weeks.

The organisational tensions nobody puts in the curriculum document

A genuinely interdisciplinary degree makes the organisation uncomfortable, and it pays to know this in advance:

1. Who owns the degree? If it belongs to one faculty, the others will contribute courses without committing. Shared governance structures — with shared budget and shared decisions — are not bureaucracy: they are the survival condition.
2. Who teaches, and how is it recognised? Co-teaching an integrated block takes more time than repeating the usual course. If the workload system does not recognise it, the design will degrade towards what the system does recognise.
3. How is the integrated part assessed? If each discipline assesses its own part separately, integration disappears de facto: students optimise what counts. Shared evidence and shared rubrics are needed.
4. What happens in year three? Founding enthusiasm lasts two years. After that, the degree survives if it is anchored in structure — governance, workload, assessment — and dies if it depended on the people who created it.

A quick test for your project

If you are designing — or redesigning — a degree, three diagnostic questions:

• Can you explain the problem the degree answers without naming any discipline?
• Did the graduate profile exist before the list of subjects, or was it written afterwards to justify it?
• Is there any integrated experience with real weight in assessment before the final year?

Three yeses: you mean it. Three noes: you have a sum of departments with an attractive name.

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This process — from purpose to profile, from profile to experiences, from experiences to structure — is a direct application of the Systemic Learning Architecture framework. If your institution is creating or rethinking degrees, let’s talk.