MIT
(Source: MIT)
When the MIT and the Fashion Institute of Technology joined forces to advance textile research and to develop and employ sustainable fabrics of the future, they found that their work was so synergistic that they wrote an instruction manual about their multi-year partnership so that others could replicate their process and benefit from their work.
“Transdisciplinary Innovation Playbook: How to build a virtual workshop that collapses walls between design and engineering and kick-starts collaboration to solve real world problems” codifies the partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA/USA, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York, NY/USA, and the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), Cambridge, MA/USA, which supported the work, into something of a template that other institutions can follow in order to develop their own innovative programs.
The playbook — based around MIT and FIT’s design and engineering synergy — is a model for successfully embarking on innovative partnerships. The manual offers step-by-step considerations for how to build interdisciplinary workshops that prepare students to think beyond their specializations and to tackle real-world problems together.
»When designers and engineers come together and open their minds to creating new technologies that ultimately will impact the world, we can imagine exciting new multi-material fibers that reveal a new spectrum of applications.«