This paper examines InterAct, an interdisciplinary studio delivered since 1989 through collaboration between the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Civil Engineering at the University of Glasgow and the University of the West of Scotland, and Quantity Surveying at Glasgow Caledonian University. InterAct offers a long-standing model of multidisciplinary, practice-oriented learning. The latest iteration positions students, over three weeks, to work in interdisciplinary teams on low-impact research stations in the Lochaber region of the Scottish Highlands, operating at RIBA Stages 1-2. At this early stage, project questions and criteria are defined collaboratively rather than derived from discipline-specific expectations, reflecting evidence from construction practice that greater time invested in early design, options appraisal and understanding the client brief tends to reduce late-stage changes and supports more effective outcomes.
The pedagogy begins by making disciplinary differences explicit. Students bring distinct assumptions—shaped by their institutional cultures—about how context is read and projects are framed. Working in remote and exposed locations, understood as critical and extreme cases within the Critical Zone, makes these assumptions more legible, revealing how insistence on staying within disciplinary lines can impose false limits on intellectual and creative capacity, while also opening the possibility of crossing them (Kim, 2023). Early sessions often produce a degree of epistemic disorientation as students encounter different ways of defining the problem, deciding what is relevant and setting early design priorities. This condition is used pedagogically to encourage them to step outside familiar comfort zones and to test how their expertise might influence, and be influenced by, others. Approaches that attend to how places are experienced, inhabited and connected to wider systems (Ingold, 2020; Tsing, 2015) help students recognise how their own position and assumptions shape what they notice and what they overlook.
The brief asks students to “touch the ground lightly”, foregrounding ecological, material and social interdependencies (Latour, 2020; Morton, 2019). The Critical Zone becomes both the environmental setting of the project and the conceptual frame for decision-making, with sustainability worked out collectively as students negotiate priorities and constraints across disciplines. Drawing on student reflections, the paper traces how initial disorientation gradually gives way to collaboration and integration. In line with Kim (2023), InterAct offers a way for built environment education to engage with uncertainty, testing alternative ways of working rather than reproducing established norms, and suggesting how interdisciplinary learning can support more situated and responsive forms of practice under complex conditions.
