We are delighted to disseminate through this proceedings a collection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the 30th ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE2023), held during July 11–14, 2023, at Dusit Thani Hotel in Hua Hin Cha Am, Thailand. The conference was organized by the A-Cube Research Group at Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, and in collaboration with the International Society of Transdisciplinary Engineering (ISTE) and ReCap 4.0 Consortium with the support of the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union.

TE2023 brought together more than 115 participants from reputed educational institutes and well-known global corporates located in twenty countries on five continents to set an international forum for academic people and interested industry professionals to exchange their knowledge and ideas connected to the conference theme “Leveraging Transdisciplinary Engineering in a Changing and Connected World.”

As we are experiencing, technological advancement has created a new landscape for how business functions and exposed individuals to an open, connected world. The unexpected pandemic has further expedited the need for change. All industrial, business, and education sectors have been challenged and have already begun to leverage technologies to improve operational performance. We all are experiencing a wind of change. An open, connected world allows us to access things in the blink of an eye. An open, connected world opens a door of opportunity for great ideas. An open, connected world can also turn those who remain in the status quo to be the history of tomorrow. It will no longer be a trade-off between quality and speed for a business in an open, connected world. They both must be there. Those who cannot deliver them will be gone with the wind because someone somewhere will. That is the power of an open, connected world.

Therefore, straightforward, simple problems have become rare in practice in today’s world. Problems that await us to solve are much more complex and require integrative knowledge from several disciplines. Technology alone cannot be the answer. Collaborative teams of people with an agile mindset, the ability to see a holistic picture and equipped with knowledge and skills in various disciplines are indispensable to exploit the technologies effectively to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem in the changing and connected world. That is how vital Transdisciplinary Engineering is today. That is why we were together to share experiences, brainstorm, and redraw our identity and boundary of belonging.

Besides parallel paper presentation sessions contributing to the proceedings, five prominent international and local speakers shared their valuable experiences and insights with our participants in the keynote sessions, covering different aspects, from economy to industry to technology to design and education. The ISTE also ran a panel discussion to solidify ideas to define Transdisciplinary Engineering. Some of our participants also offered their expertise in interesting workshop sessions, and some shared their recent works in a poster session. Contributions in all aspects from all parties made this TE2023 successful.

This proceedings contains 93 articles that passed through abstract and full paper review processes and were invited for oral presentation at TE2023. They were selected from among 117 submissions of full papers and are arranged according to the conference program covering 7 main categories: Product Design and Development, Team Working, Smart Operations for Value Chain Management, Transdisciplinary Approaches, Engineering Education, Critical Issues in Transdisciplinary Engineering, and Theoretical Contributions. According to the word cloud of the titles of the full papers submitted, design is the most popular word, followed by digital, transdisciplinary, and engineering. In fact, design and transdisciplinary have been in the top five of popular words for the last few TE conferences reflecting how transdisciplinary engineering strongly connects and contributes to support various aspects of design that have become much more complicated in today’s open, connected world. Digital, another popular word, reveals our community is pursuing digital technology-related research to support smart operations for value chain management. It is worth noting that words related to education appear more often in the titles. Few of them are in the top ten, however, which gives an insight into the importance of incorporating transdisciplinarity in modern engineering education.

Pisut Koomsap

Adam Cooper

Josip Stjepandić