Different by design

It is generally known that architectural practice relies heavily on the interactions between architects and other professionals. However, during their formal education, most students attending architecture schools, and engineering schools for that mat, get very little (if any) exposure to decision making in conditions that involve expertise and/or worldviews beyond thoseter, reflected and valued by their own discipline. In the past 10 years, a project-based learning initiative was developed between the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University in an international context involving several other universities around the world. Throughout this experience, we have identified several issues that have shown to be crucial to these interactions. This paper elaborates on three key issues: improvement of communication skills, empowerment through developing strategies of leadership, and recognition of own and others' worldviews. We also make the case to include experiential educational situations that can introduce these aspects into the academic curricula of architecture and engineering schools.