TD School graduates: Where are they now?
Here’s how our graduates are applying their transdisciplinary education in the workforce
If you’ve ever wondered where a Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII) might land you, our ex-students will probably say; ‘Anywhere you want to go’.
Recently, seven of our graduates joined a panel session where they spoke to current BCII students about life after university and harnessing your transdisciplinary (TD) education in the workplace.
Panellists
- Bridget Leonard, innovation consultant at KPMG Futures
- Claire Byrne, grants and marketing coordinator at Centre for Inclusive Design
- Isaac Peiris, strategy and product manager at Mamamia
- Jordan Putnam, strategic designer at Invast Global
- Laurence Presland, principal full stack web developer at NSW Department of Customer Service
- Samuel Walker, manager strategy and execution at Lightbulb
- Sandrine Foskett, innovation consultant at KPMG Futures
Q: How do you explain BCII and TD to professional contacts that you meet?
Jordan Putnam: When you're trying to explain a foreign concept to someone, do your best to take them on a journey. I usually start from the beginning of what the degree was like; complex problem solving, human centred design, and design thinking strategies. Then I explain that by the end of our degree, we worked with companies who provided real-world problems to us. And we used those initial teachings to help solve those problems.
Isaac Peiris: The things I talk about are problem-solving, teamwork, responding to a brief - those things are quite applicable across industry. When it comes to talking to a wide audience, you want to talk to your breadth of skills because that’s the way the workforce is now. The people who stand out are the ones that can work easily with anyone, across any team and get stuff done.
Q: How do you use TD or creative intelligence? And do both play a part in your everyday work?
Sam Walker: Transdisciplinarity is a bigger window. I think there's the coordination of work as the really basic level – such as getting people aligned or getting people in shape to do work. But this is mostly interdisciplinary, where everyone's working in their skill sets, but we're doing things together. This happens a lot, where you end up in workshops and bringing people together to start to solve problems.
Transdisciplinary however, is when we're bringing large groups of people together to solve complex problems. It’s when we all have skin in the game. We all have small parts of the knowledge, or parts of the puzzle. And we’re there to create something new together. But this is also the part of transdisciplinarity that a lot of industry is missing, and that most aren’t very good at, or trained for.
People are good at coordinating work, and ‘agile’ is the buzzword of the world now. But that’s just people coordinating and getting things done. As BCII graduates, we can dive into the collaboration space, help people work together better, but also strive to create newness from the things that people know, and the things they are struggling with.
Sandrine Foskett: A major part of my work is to make people comfortable with being emergent, as opposed to having the answer at the beginning. Consultants are typically paid to be the smartest people in the room, and not having the answer is something they're typically not accustomed to.
When we're discovering new products, we go and map pain points to understand the system that our clients are operating in. From there, we must make it clear to stakeholders and colleagues operating outside of the innovation world why we're doing it. When you’ve had success for the past 20 years undertaking the same processes, trying out new methods of innovation isn't always a priority. You have to spell out the net outcomes you’re working towards.
[Transdisciplinary] is when we're bringing large groups of people together to solve complex problems. It’s when we all have skin in the game. We all have small parts of the knowledge, or parts of the puzzle. And we’re there to create something new together. But this is also the part of transdisciplinarity that a lot of industry is missing, and that most aren’t very good at, or trained for.
– Sam Walker, BCII graduate
Q: Have you been able to introduce TD thinking to any of your colleagues or clients? How did you enable this? What barriers did you come up against?
Isaac Peiris: Transdisciplinarity in the true academic sense is not very common in industry. There’s a lot of cross-disciplinarity, and people love that. You'll have those classic stakeholders who say: ‘Let's get everyone in a workshop with Post-it notes’. But I haven’t seen a lot of true transdisciplinarity – or the new processes and practices that emerge from it. It's a process moving from cross-disciplinarity and getting past the initial hype and buzzwords before you can really step into anything transdisciplinary.
Laurence Presland: When you [TD students] graduate, and go out into the workforce, you will end up in a range of different types of workplaces and companies. And I think some of you will end up in young startups with people that think like you. But most of you will land in business environments filled with people that have done the same thing for 20 years, that think ‘Why would I change? I get paid, it's good, please leave me alone’.
My only advice is to just be ready for that. You will land in these environments full of people that are not going to listen to you. But when that happens, don't be disheartened. Get back to first principles. Explain to people the benefits of thinking in this way and see where you can get.
Back row (from left to right): Jordan Putnam, Laurence Presland, Samuel Walker
Front row (from left to right): Isaac Peiris, Bridget Leonard, Claire Byrne, Sandrine Foskett
Q: If you come up against these barriers, do you stick it out? Are the things you can do to develop change?
So, doing a stakeholder map, looking at your systems thinking, and communicating consistently. As that process happens, they will learn to trust in you, and see that this TD approach really works. You will get there in the end, and when you do, you’ll have a lot more concrete evidence and a much stronger project.
– Claire Byrne, BCII graduate
Bridget Leonard: I facilitate workshops that are at in beginning stages of a product lifecycle. Something that really gets people aligned in those first stages is contextualising. I do this by saying: ‘This is what the full picture looks like, and right now, we're in the part where it's complex and ambiguous. And we need to understand the pain points and all the other factors in this area first’. I find that by taking people on this journey, they are more likely to stick with it.
Claire Byrne: I think one challenge can be navigating fast ideas that are thrown your way and communicating the value of taking it slow and going back to simple steps. So, doing a stakeholder map, looking at your systems thinking, and communicating consistently. As that process happens, they will learn to trust in you, and see that this TD approach really works. You will get there in the end, and when you do, you’ll have a lot more concrete evidence and a much stronger project.
With studying a degree like BCII, you've done all these projects where you see how TD works. You started with nothing, and you turn out amazing projects and amazing presentations. Take that confidence with you –you’ve already applied it to real world projects, and you’ll continue to apply it to real projects in the future.
Q: Any final thoughts on what TD looks like in the workplace?
Laurence Presland: I've been pondering how transdisciplinarity is a big part of my life just in the way that I think about myself.
I think of myself in the world in relation to complex problems. When I think about a problem, like the war in Ukraine right now, I think that possibly before my BCII days, I would have thought there was a simple solution. But now I have this understanding of the amount of things that are flowing into that situation and the complexity behind it. Things are not as simple as they seem. And the networking opportunities after graduation from TD School are also unique - that's something I don’t think you get if you're just doing a single core degree, or if you're really deeply embedded in just one area - you are connected to people from all walks of life.
As I move forward, I think transdisciplinarity is not defined by a role or a job. You have this incredible set of skills that can be applied to problems across the board. It doesn't look like one specific graduate role or specific job. It's how you approach every day and how you think about complex problems.
As I move forward, I think transdisciplinarity is not defined by a role or a job. You have this incredible set of skills that can be applied to problems across the board. It doesn't look like one specific graduate role or specific job. It's how you approach every day and how you think about complex problems.
– Laurence Presland, BCII graduate
Adding to our vast creative ecosystem, several TD graduates, like our seven panellists, remain engaged with our teaching and learning by returning as industry partners. These regenerative learning pathways are another proud feature of TD School, where students work alongside industry to explore some of the most disruptive forces facing business, society, and the environment.
If you’re looking to connect to TD School or find opportunities to connect with our unique teaching and learning, say hello at TDSchoolPartnerships@uts.edu.au
