African philosophies of Ubuntu prioritise humanising the community of learning. Contextualising Ubuntu within the emerging Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) creates a tension between algorithms and the craft of design scholarship. The effect of the 5IR, while being more human-centred, is also unpredictable in terms of how technology replaces or automates human activity. This has led students to use technology tools to shortcut or circumvent activities that result in deep or transformative learning. Within the context of design education, this threatens the aptitudes and dispositions needed for engaging with the design process with the goal of establishing critical and creative authorship.

Collaboration is recognised as essential in the process of solving large-scale complex problems and can therefore be observed in both the design industry and in design education. As part of design collaboration, design teams go through a process of framing the design problem, proposing potential solutions, and taking the steps required to produce an outcome. Framing, as originally defined by Schön (1999), provides a method to identify the decisions that a design team takes on their journey to establish potential design solutions. Ideally, for a collaboration to be successful design teams need to arrive at a share frame characterised by a common understanding of the problem, solution, and actions.

Multigenerational households are inhabited by three or more generations cohabiting; however, homes are not always designed to accommodate multiple generations. Having been raised within a home filled with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents and siblings, the personal experience of the primary researcher has been drawn on to frame the analysis of the challenges associated with multigenerational living. Multigenerational living requires functional spaces: space that efficiently includes all occupants to create a harmonious environment.

In this paper, we examine the impact that transdisciplinary and/or multi-disciplinary educational approaches have in developing critical and creative thinking competencies in a bachelor’s degree context. Strategies relating to integrated assessments within research-based modules are used to explore how transcending disciplinary boundaries in different fields are approached – one a business qualification and the other a creative/design-based qualification. This is also particularly significant in terms of an emerging call to contextualise curricula for Afrika, including adopting more decolonised transdisciplinary research approaches.

Design education has an integral association with engaging both critical and creative thinking. While the previous critical cross-field outcomes explicitly fostered both critical and creative development (SAQA 2000), the newer level descriptors (SAQA 2012) focus almost exclusively on critical thinking. This could be because critical and creative thinking are often regarded as synonymous. Authors like Macat International Limited (2017) support this understanding by including creative thinking as a component of critical thinking, while other authors differentiate between the two concepts.