| Sumario: | Purpose The current service and technological design of the health care system is unable to meet the needs of an ageing society. We expect healthcare needs to increase dramatically in the future and if the service industry and technological innovations cannot keep up with the increasingly aged population, this would impact our society tremendously. We will need people who are talented, professional, caring and full of creative spirit to invent or design products and services for the elderly. As such, we would need to arrange a way to cultivate potential innovators who would eventually encourage and/or create a new industry for an ageing society. Our program envisions this as its main goal. We are attempting to create a new learning model in higher education using multidisciplinary approaches. The goal of this new learning model called 'T workshop' is to cultivate 'T-shaped' professionals, elites who interact and cooperate with a wide range of disciplines and fields for the benefit of an aging society. We employ two professional instructors with problem identification and problem solving skills to cooperate in this workshop. The problem people have with understanding the needs of an aging society is related to dealing with the furniture, diet, and games of the elderly. Moreover, we hope to teach students to reorganize the thought patterns they use to identify and solve problems in a way that will allow them to polish their skills through solving real problems, such problems related to sleep in the elderly. This way, students receive training while creating actual solutions. Through this teaching method, students would not only learn a single type of professional knowledge, but also learn how to use different skills in different disciplines to find suitable solutions for various problems. Method The learning process of the students in this program begins with observation using experience, design thinking and multidisciplinary collaboration; then, the students are asked to reflect the possibilities of their own profession and to understand the thinking of those in other fields. This ongoing project features three main elements: (i) dual-instructors, (ii) monograph development (approaching a practical problem and designing a solution), (iii) multidisciplinary peer review. The course lasts two weeks and is structured as follows: students are first given an introduction to a specific age-related problem to help the students understand more about a particular issue. We then introduce the design thinking methods and the mode of the operation. Lastly, the students will apply what they learned in the morning to practical activities in the afternoon. The students are then given a week to generate creative ideas so that in the second week they may present their solutions or prototypes of the products they design and share what they learned throughout the process. Students are given small take-home assignments to help them practice how to observe and develop ideas. Results & Discussion We have held 22 workshops from March of 2012 to March of 2014, where a total of 475 students have participated, led by a total of 44 instructors (two per workshop). A summary of the participants' responses is provided below. First, their ability to observe has improved on average; this is because of the clear observational instructions given by the first instructor, which allows students to identify problems that can be solved. The students also became more adept at designing thanks to our design professor. Second, the students learned to think from a different angle by leaving their comfort zone and crossing to another discipline. Third, the students learned to cooperate by generating ideas and designing products as a team. Furthermore, having two instructors in the same room allows students to see how different each discipline approaches the same problem and how different disciplines interact. The current system of education lacks connection and interaction between different industries, which is something our ageing society will desperately need in the future. Moreover, we were glad to meet our goal in increasing the communication skills by gathering participants from different backgrounds to solve a problem as a team with some professional help from the instructors and teaching assistants. We believed this kind of T-shape cultivation would help break down barriers between different professionals and increase the possibilities of multidisciplinary cooperation or interaction. It will also help provide more opportunities and possibilities of a better life for ageing societies of the future.
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