The MRes in Art & Design is a twelve months postgraduate full-time course launched in 2016. The course is aimed to students who want to advance and challenge the discipline through the practice of art and design research. In this paper I describe how diversity is approached in one of the MRes Pathways, Design, as a teaching platform that supports the development of interdisciplinary knowledge via the learning experience drafted by the curriculum and implemented by the students. The Design Pathway is one of the four MRes pathways representing the college’s Schools, which weekly meetings build a multidisciplinary culture from the debates engineering, design, fine art, architecture and communication
students exchange on research practice and methods. The Pathway builds on this process and makes multidisciplinary interdisciplinarity; students of different backgrounds (Engineering, Architecture, Product Design, Fashion, etc) are engaged in collaborative activities which aim to stimulate through the practice of design research self-criticality, reflection and questions. Some of the findings illustrated in this paper show how the engagement of staff and PhD/MPhil students across the different School’s MA courses contributes to support interdisciplinary and foster the intermingling of ideas; this blurs the discipline boundary and develops an interdisciplinary profile built upon the discussion and critics of the different practices through applied design research. The MRes Design Pathway becomes an experiential journey where research design methodologies provide the space for disciplines like engineering and fashion to learn from each other and fuse the respective knowledge in cohesive wholes. From the evidences given by students’ feedbacks the Design Pathway teaching model and curriculum have been proving to foster diversity as skill, identity and approach that students learn and develop throughout the course. This particular aspect of the curriculum makes the most of the impact in fostering and supporting a culture of interdisciplinarity, which happens via a participative and active teaching leading towards the development of creative thinking in collaborative and interdisciplinary teams.