Special issue on ‘new transdisciplinary practices for intelligent manufacturing for industry 4.0’

Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE) is an emerging area of research able to evolve traditional engineering approaches by transcending the technical disciplines. It can be successfully applied in different fields, by combining natural sciences, applied sciences, social sciences, and humanities to achieve a higher level of comprehension and awareness of the context in which industrial products, processes, systems, and services will be implemented and experienced by users (Borsato et al. Citation2016). Research in TE also incorporates social science methodologies to acquire knowledge about users and context, and solve ill-defined, socially relevant problems. Based on recent evidence, it can be stated that numerous engineering problems can be characterised as ill-defined and socially relevant, too (Wognum et al. Citation2019).