Designing the Future

2018

There is much international discussion regarding the role of industrial design in a rapidly changing world. Immediate employment needs can lead to a focus on design skills and knowledge needed today. However, we also need to predict the needs of tomorrow, and recognize that industrial design exists in an increasingly complex environment, with increasing demands for cross-professional links and knowledge. Shifts in practice have required design education to restructure, often as add ons and patchwork solutions and more rarely as brand new programs where the old emphasis upon skills is only faintly seen. Different education institutions, programs and practitioners have responded differently to these challenges and diversity proliferates. University educators find themselves in a period of reflection and renewal with competing factors vying for dominance. While there is no single solution, the authors propose a conceptual model that helps explore the strands in the complexity and construct a way forward that privileges clarity and dialogue.

2015

International Journal of Engineering Education, 2012

This paper presents an analysis of the capacity of design centric methodologies to prepare engineering students to succeed in the market. Gaps are brainstormed and analyzed with reference to their importance. Reasons that may lead the newly graduated engineers not to succeed right from the beginning of their professional lives have also been evaluated. A comparison among the two subjects above was prepared, reviewed and analyzed. The influence of multidisciplinary, multicultural and complex environmental influences created in the current global business era is taken into account. The industry requirements in terms of what they expect to 'receive' from their engineers are evaluated and compared to the remaining of the study above. An innovative approach to current engineering education that utilizes traditional designcentric methodologies is then proposed, aggregating new disciplines to supplement the traditional engineering education. The solution encompasses the inclusion of disciplines from Human Sciences and Emotional Intelligence fields willing to better prepare the engineer of tomorrow to work in a multidisciplinary, globalized, complex and team working environment. A pilot implementation of such an approach is reviewed and conclusions are drawn from this educational project.

This discussion paper reflects upon the 100+ years of experience of the authors in delivering tertiary level education to engineering designers. It compares the teaching approach taken for professional engineers and engineering technologists and promotes the need for T-shaped designers. The merits of a project-led approach to engineering design are discussed and an outline for an inter-disciplinary Master level programme is considered. The discussion combines the reflections of the authors with some of the latest research into design education.

2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

in Engineering Education, earning her doctorate from Purdue University's Engineering Education program in 2008. Her research focuses on the investigation and application of complex professional skills, specifically design ideation, innovation practices, and creative processes within engineering, outside of engineering, and cross disciplinarily. Her research includes an emphasis on the translation of research to practice in the form of pedagogy, curriculum development, and faculty support and programming in implementing evidence-based best practices in teaching and learning.

As an academic team, we have only recently come together and begun collaborating on the development of the next generation mechanical engineering design curriculum at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. However, despite a collective experience of over 100 years in the university sector, we continue to be challenged by the educational development of engineering designers in respect of learning objectives, curriculum content, teaching approach, academic rigour, and professional competencies at each and every level of our taught programmes.

Towards characterising design-based learning in engineering education: a review of the literature, 2011

Design-based learning is a teaching approach akin to problem-based learning but one to which the design of artefacts, systems and solutions in project-based settings is central. Although design-based learning has been employed in the practice of higher engineering education, it has hardly been theorised at this educational level. The aim of this study is to characterise design-based learning from existing empirical research literature on engineering education. Drawing on a perspective that accounts for domain-specific, idiosyncratic and learner-centred aspects of design problems in the context of engineering education, 50 empirical studies on project-based and problem-based engineering education, to which the design of artefacts is central, were reviewed. Based on the findings, design-based learning is characterised with regard to domain-specificity, learner expertise and task authenticity. The implications of this study for the practice of engineering education are discussed.

2003

The organisation Sharing Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) was formed in 1979 as an informal forum for engineering design teachers to meet and to share their experience. In 2002 the organisation has terminated its activities and the members have agreed to help in the formation of a new Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society. This paper presents a history of the activities and achievements of SEED, and suggests how its work will be continued in the DESIG. Over nearly quarter of a century SEED has pursued four main activities. The first has been the holding of an annual seminar/conference on engineering design education topics. Each event has been on a specified theme, such as creativity, assessment, quality and qualification, computer-aided learning and so on, and many have involved extensive discussion by delegates, recorded in the proceedings of the event, on the topic of the conference. The second activity has been the recommendation of a standard curriculum for engineering design and an integrated series of preparation material monographs on engineering design teaching, directly related to topics identified in the curriculum. The third activity has been publication of a comprehensive set of Design Procedural Guides to support engineering students in design project work. These guides cover a range of topics including power transmission, mechanical positioning and control, structures and other subjects. Finally, SEED has published an extensive collection of tried and tested engineering design projects. The DESIG shares SEED's aim of providing a forum for the identification, sharing and dissemination of best practice in engineering design education. In order to achieve this aim, the DESIG will carry out such activities as organising Design Education conferences and workshops, promoting working groups to develop key engineering design education issues, promoting special design education issues of journals and maintaining a engineering design education resource web site. The paper reviews the main continuing challenges in engineering design education as we enter the 21st century, and in particular sets out a draft agenda for the initial development of the DESIG.

Today's engineers' needs are evolving rapidly as the information and technologies that compete for their attentions. At the same time, our institutions and systems are stretched to their limits to keep up with the changing demands of the times. There is, especially, a need to sustain reflective integration of social and technical knowledge into the future generations of engineering, to make engineers more humane, in order for them to generate technological solutions that are more human-centric. Addressing such needs requires new approaches to teaching and designing engineering courses. Any advancement in the education sector from here forward requires a new thinking paradigm that can be applied in large-scale systematic reform of education: design thinking. This paper outlines means to use design thinking as the foundational methodology for transforming a traditional electrical and computer engineering department into an agile department where design thinking, systems thinking, professional skills and inclusion are promoted, and collaborative, inquiry-driven processes are stimulated to create and sustain new ways of thinking, interacting, teaching, learning and working.

International Journal of …, 2004

This paper is based on the premise that the design ideas and methods that cut across most fields of engineering, herein called integrated design, have grown rapidly in the last two or three decades and that integrated design now has the status of cumulative knowledge. This is old news for many, but a rather limited approach to teaching design knowledge is still common in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. In many engineering departments in the United States, students are only required to have a motivational and experiential introductory design course that is followed several years later by an experiential and discipline-specific capstone course . Some limitations of the capstone approach, such as too little and too late, have been noted . In some departments, and for some students, another experiential design course may be taken as an elective. A few non-design courses have an experiential design project added following a design across the curriculum approach. However, design education may often be only 5-10% of the required engineering undergraduate curriculum.