The issue of relevance in the curriculum tends to focus on perceived gaps between academic and industrial views of a discipline.
However, a second gap is also present: between the discipline (whether industrial or academic) and the students' own social context. Addressing a subject from a student's own context may help to develop a deeper engagement with a topic that meets both "real world" and "academic" requirements. This could be viewed as "deliberate irrelevance".
At the University of Dundee the traditional undergraduate historical and theoretical modules were developed to approach the study of design from a social context and resulted in students embarking on self-directed research often outside their own disciplines, but developing high-level skills that were then taken back into the studio.
This paper presents an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the model and suggests a method for developing interdisciplinary modules.