As science and technology have complex interactions and conflicts among human being, society and environment, so there are various spread issues that cannot be solved by only single field. So, we need integration of knowledge to give solutions and create future innovations. Therefore, it is urgent to promote development of transdisciplinary human resources in both university and industry. The special issue includes six papers on fostering transdisciplinary human resources.

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In this chapter, after discussing the definitions and the difference of the transdisciplinary human resources and the multidisciplinary ones, we will mention the reason why the transdisciplinary human resources are necessary today. Furthermore we will describe their expected roles and their present situation at each level of university, company and nation. At first, we will point out that every professor himself should be transdisciplinary in his university and also that there are a lot of his active domain on his campus. Next, based on the corporate hearing result, it will be pointed out that, the transdisciplinary human resources are significant and necessary in many companies. Lastly, the necessity of the transdisciplinary human resources will be described from the international viewpoint as well as on the national-strategy.

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This document describes the prospect of the human resources development toward transdisciplinary dialogues among humanities and sciences. At a time in the past, “Philosophy” included both humanities and sciences. However, as the science has been highly developed, it has been separated into multiple disciplines, largely humanities and sciences. But the crisis of today cannot be solved by neither a single discipline nor science. To develop the transdisciplinary research of humanities and sciences, we should make 3 concepts of education system. The first is the integrated curriculum from elementary schools, the second is liberal arts at universities, and the third is interactions among established professionals.

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In this paper, one of the evaluation system in transdisciplinary education and human resources development is proposed. Proposed evaluation system is theoretically supported by the Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Especially, some educational experience in the advanced institute of the industrial technology is shown as the explanatory examples.

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Accreditation system with JABEE has been started and Japanese traditional engineering education programs are progressing, while there are few programs to develop transdisciplinary human resources. This article overviews these situations and introduces some transdisciplinary programs in Japan and abroad.

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Companies are trying to develop transdisciplinary human resources through every opportunity in OFFJT and OJT. We report the present status and issues of human resources development based on information obtained from company interviews.

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This paper summarizes the findings and recommendations on the transdisciplinary human resources development. New departments and graduate schools have recently been established for promotion of transdisciplinary education and researches. Introduction of project-based design and internship should effectively be done in collaboration with industries. The government, universities and industries should create together a future plan for the transdisciplinary human resources development.

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This paper explores the complementary nature of multiple approaches for designing and using complex artifacts when users’ functional requirements are highly demanding, and environmental constraints that their designers confront are stringent. Such approaches include axiomatic design, architecture theory, quality function deployment (QFD), quality engineering (QE), total quality management (TQM), technology and operations management (TOM), industrial engineering (IE), digital engineering, and automation. The paper argues that practitioners should use these approaches in more systematic ways, and researchers in each approach need to share each other’s knowledge for achieving the same goal – coping with complex artifacts.

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This paper introduces our project called “SICE City.” SICE City is an ideal city proposed by the SICE (Society of Instrument and Control Engineers) with the aim of developing a city that can improve the motivation of its citizens. We describe the objectives of the city design and the problems that must be solved in order to develop the city. We also outline the possible contributions of the SICE in this regard. The main aim of our study is to develop an objective method to evaluate how technologies can contribute to improving motivation. SICE City is a transdisciplinary platform for integrating not only SICE technologies but also universal knowledge and insight provided by the TRAFST (Transdiciplinary Federation of Science and Technology).

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In 2008, TRAFST (Transdisciplinary Federation of Science and Technology) has again received a commission of the project to formulate transdisciplinary academic roadmap from Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. This document describes some episodes in study camp for academic roadmap to introduce a part of excitement of the discussion in the process of formulation of academic roadmap.

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This article introduces the Japan Society of Precision Engineering (JSPE). JSPE has about 6200 individualmembers and 250 corporatemembers. Since the predecessor society “Seiki Kyoukai” was founded on October 10th in 1933, JSPE has been celebrating its 75th anniversary for one year starting from October in 2008. JSPE promotes precision engineering in industry and academia. It covers a broad spectrum of production (monozukuri) technologies – Design and Production systems, Precision machining, Mechatronics, Metrology, Humans and Environment. This article presents the history, activities and special events for the 75th anniversary of JSPE.

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The social informatics is a new field. It researches various objects, events and society from the view point of “Information.” It is consisted of transdisciplinary studies crossing the border between humanities and sciences. The Japan Association for Social Informatics (JASI) is very active. The members of JASI consist of not only scholars but also persons of business. Specialized fields of members are extensive. Furthermore, JASI began to publish the international academic journal on social informatics, “Journal of Socio-Informatics.” The mission of JASI is to contribute the quality of the global society.

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