The committees will identify multifaceted solutions that can be applied to noisy, real-world problems and will guide the work of the large transdisciplinary design teams that developed each Destination Area and Strategic Growth Area during phase one.

The design teams will remain at the core of the second-phase efforts. Stakeholder committees will tap these teams to carry out many of the tasks involved in advancing the Destination Areas and Strategic Growth Areas by making new hires, planning more facilities, developing curricula around key topic areas, and structuring large-scale research proposals and research and engagement partnerships.

The development of the Destination Areas initiative, launched in the spring of 2016, has been guided by the methodology of iterative design. Instead of delaying action over months or years while studying a problem, iterative design involves using what's known to begin a project, testing and refining along the way, and incorporating feedback in real time to continuously improve and adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

The first phase of the Destination Areas initiative, which extended from spring 2016 through the beginning of November, engaged faculty university-wide and included town hall meetings, collection of survey data, and review of findings. This second phase, which will be driven by deep faculty engagement and stakeholder leadership, extends for 18 months, through May 2018.

According to Rikakis, developing solutions to these multidimensional challenges requires the synthesis of humanistic, scientific, and technological perspectives, which in turn means that long-held boundaries, such as those separating science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields and liberal arts, may no longer be as meaningful and may need to be transcended.

That framework — and its potential to deliver research and capable, service-oriented graduates prepared to change the world in powerful ways — differentiates Virginia Tech from its peer institutions and advances the university's efforts to redefine the role of the land-grant university in today's global economy.