Conference Agenda

Design projects units are an essential element for Design Engineering students at our University and represent 20 ECTS credits at level-5 and 30 ECTS credits at level-6. Students integrate and apply knowledge from a range of taught units and subjects they may be unfamiliar with through self-directed learning. Students also demonstrate they meet specific elements of the Engineering Council’s learning outcomes for accredited programmes. For level-5, students work towards individual and group projects; level-6 students work on a single individual project of their own proposal.

Recently, level-6 students have proposed and designed projects requiring AI vision control-systems. These projects presented a problem for supervision, especially during the pandemic, as the department lacked technical expertise, equipment, and experience in application. Students therefore treated these AI subsystems as “black-box” exercises.

To address this issue, technical requirements were compiled from typical use-cases and combined with accessibility of learning material, extent of ecosystem, usability, and compatibility. A range of AI technologies were evaluated before selecting the Nvidia Jetson Nano; these provide a complete on-board workflow of deep-neural-network (DNN) retraining and deployment.

From the existing literature, a streamlined training-programme was developed to introduce the technology to both level-5 and level-6 project students. This provided hands on experience through familiarization with the interface and pretrained DNN models for image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation.

Level-5 project students were assigned a group project to design and build a part-sorting technical demonstrator utilizing AI object-detection integrated to PLC control. The AI workflow was executed entirely on-board with the Jetson Nano. Students collected and annotated images of scratched and unscratched plate components to create a dataset (ground-truth) before retraining an existing DNN (SSD-mobilenet v2) using Pytorch. Students compiled a simple python script to call the DNN within the device’s DetectNET framework and provide signaling over GPIO to the PLC when detecting scratches and plates. Students also designed the electronic interface and programmed the PLC using ladder-logic to provide electrical control of their sorting machine’s electro-mechanical functions.

Level-6 project students were able to integrate the technology into projects where appropriate and two students chose to do so. One project utilized a similar object-detect workflow to check if chili peppers are ripe for harvest; the only change was to off-board the image capture with ground-truth annotation through an alternative software package (CVAT). The second student used an existing semantic segmentation network (Multi-Human-Parsing) to identify people trapped under collapsed buildings, with GPIO controlling alarms when a threshold is reached for particular classes.

level-5 and level-6 students gained valuable knowledge in the practical application of AI in control systems. The level of learning suitable for proving a design through the use of technical demonstrator rather than at a production level.

Three technical issues were identified through this work:

Specific human-errors in the annotation process were only identifiable once exported to another annotation package such as CVAT.

CVAT became unsupported after sanctions were imposed on Russia and Intel withdrew operations.

Like many semiconductor dependent resources, Jetson Nano’s became difficult to source.

The first year of a student’s higher education significantly affects their performance and probability of completion. Tinto found that the first few weeks are critical for the students regarding motivation, connecting socially and connecting academically. Most of the students who decide to quit or drop out do so during the first weeks of their education. Thus, it is imperative to integrate students into their new academic environment as effectively as possible, meaning that universities must be aware of and utilize this window of opportunity to give the students a meaningful start.

Every four years a survey is conducted to map how the students in Norway feel (SHoT). In recent years there has been an increase in reported loneliness amongst the students. In SHoT 2022 36% reported that they either miss someone to be with, feel left outside or feel isolated often or very often. This is an increase from 2018 where 30% of the students reported this. Another striking result from this research is that 34% report that they only have a few friends and 7% report that they do not have any friends.

At the University of Agder the civil engineering first-year students, of both bachelor and master, were assigned a start-up project in their first week. This start-up project was designed by the some of the employees at the civil engineering department. The students were divided into groups of 4-5 students. The purpose of the start-up project was to design a small student cottage were functionality, sustainability and design comprised the main assessment criteria. They also had to build a model in a scale of 1:20. The students had three days to complete the project and presented their final products in front of the rest of their class, and a jury consisting of employees at the civil engineering department.

After having the presentation of the final projects, a survey was distributed to the students. 88% rated the project as 4 (to a large degree) and 5 (to a very large degree) when it came to academic collaboration. Furthermore, when asked to which extent the project prompted a social arena and contributed to gaining new friends, 90% and 79% respectively, replied either 4 or 5. The results of this study can provide other educational institutions with insights on how to meet the first-year students, and how to provide a social arena. By having a start-up project which is both a theoretical and physical task, the students find other students to befriend and work with.

Design fiction develops tangible prototypes to assess factors in a near future in a more concrete way. The feedback loop into the present, however, remains as a set of recommendations or guidelines for new product development. This paper describes a methodology that includes reframing specific factors from the future to the present by using two related problem formulations, one in the future and one in the present. The methodology is used in an MSc of Industrial Design course where student teams work on project formulations for Space settings in a near future and reframe the projects to situations on Earth where factors concerning the problem, context, users or working principles are revisited, interpreted and reworked to create a value proposition for the present in a concrete manner.

The findings indicate that insights can be interpreted at various levels of abstraction and, when combined with critical thinking, stimulate the reuse of processual aspects and reframing of specific factors addressed in the future formulation into the current project formulation.

The learning space in the 21st century, cannot be limited to a closed enviroment within a classroom. It is important to push the limits of both, creativity and innovation on the mind of the apprentice. Mixing apparently dissimilar topics, awakening intrinsic motivation and following a design methodology are the keys to achieve an efficient learning. Challenge based on learning, it is an integrative pedagogical approach that combines experience, cognition, and behavior. This approach, takes advantage of students' interest in finding practical meaning to education, while developing key skills competencies in a world mediated by rapid technological advance and sustainability. On this paper, a pedagogical strategy is exposed to impact first-year students in the application of a design methodology and the development of competencies in graphic expression, manufacturing, critical thinking, and tolerance to frustration. These skills, were obtained from the challenge of designing, materializing and testing a floating luminaire that works from solar energy. These prototypes, were manufactured with sustainable materials and processes, considering as an aesthetic/formal referent the work of Ersnt Haeckel and as a physical principle, Archimedes' law to achieve buoyancy and stability on water. The satisfying outcome of this learning experience, consisted on 56 luminaries that enlightened and floated over the water mirror of the cultural center of the XXXX´s university library, Luis Echavarría Villegas.

This paper is an ongoing research study that highlights sustainability and social ventures to create connections between academic and business worlds in order to design towards the new functions of XXI century’s reality.

The authors underline how design practices can help to create a pilot project, implementing social changes. This means that governmental inefficiency presents itself as a new problem that designers, educators and entrepreneurs must face, demanding to endlessly diagnose the situation. This research proposes to redesign and develop a self-sustainable habitat for minorities, such as, refugees, something that is integrated in the city and not isolated. The issue of building in historic centers is essential to understand the life of the city in a changing world. That is, it is the ability to design systems and not compact and definitive frames.

Sustainability issues are characterized by an extraordinary complexity and ambiguity as a reflex of liquid reality (Bauman, 2005), but there is still unsustainable development due to globalization of resource-intensive economic progress and consumerist lifestyle (Heinrichs and Biermann, 2015). In order to sustainability be recognized with a pluralistic view, it is urgent to develop policy instruments, such as sustainable strategies, mutual methods, and collective goals. In view of COP26 (2021), sustainability is increasing in importance relative to social changes. Nevertheless, empirical outcomes show that methodologically it is hard to translate into practice in education discussion and that often it is a question of communication rather than sustainability. “We then discuss whether sustainability communication is something ‘unique‖’ or simply communication that happens to deal with sustainability.” (Newig et al. 2013: 2978). For instance, having a discourse oriented to students, means using communication about sustainability (CaS) as it is an excellent opportunity, a sender-receiver-oriented and one-to-many communication mode, sharing ideas about sustainability (Fischer et al, 2015).

Methodologically, this research is sustained by transversal thinking, pattern-language and sustainability, connecting established methods with new techniques.

The paper present some cases studies with design students where creative activities transformed the entire urban community.

The authors want to prove that designing inclusive systems can serve as a stimulus to attract companies, creating new stakeholders that stimulate new product development and innovation.