Conference Agenda

Design education has a nuanced relationship with examples. Although they are considered useful teaching tools, their use is often restricted to illustrating the design theories and principles around which the curriculum is structured. In contrast, professional designers view examples as autonomous entities and use them to initiate a critical dialogue with their current problem space. Therefore, students must cultivate their own repertoire of solutions and learn to initiate conversations between existing solutions and design challenges, to gain a better understanding of the problem space and to generate new designs. Design curricula should accommodate those processes. This paper outlines an experiment conducted with master’s students in Applied Data Science at Utrecht University, who took a course focused on designing recommender system interfaces. The students were provided with a set of solutions of recommender interface designs as their main instruction tool. They could use this set to curate their own solution repertoire, resulting from their critical conversations between the potential solutions and their design challenges. As a result, overall, participants' work displayed more diverse designs, and they used designs patterns more flexibly. Based on this case study, we tentatively conclude that a design curriculum built around examples, complemented by theories, is advantageous, as long as special attention is given to helping students initiate fruitful iterations between their challenges and a set of solutions

Competence-based learning is oriented to learning by the implementation of challenges where students must demonstrate that they have learned and generated knowledge through the development of applied skills.

Design education has been significantly transformed in the last ten years thanks to the integration of new perspectives and the search for a more sustainable and resilient vision due to the great impact that the discipline has had on environmental issues in the past.

With the need to renew the curriculum on a competency-based approach and outlining the visions oriented towards a sustainable future, this paper describes the process of curricular design that has been followed for more than five years to materialize in a proposal of the Design program with a strategic and emerging perspective concerning social innovation and the regeneration of the planet.

This paper presents the use of the Design Competency Assessment (DesCA) framework to enhance collaboration between courses in an interdisciplinary design-based curriculum at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). The paper illustrates the use of this framework in SUTD’s second term Design Thinking Project (DTP). DTP explicitly bringing together the learnings of the courses taking place in that term, in particular the introductory Design Thinking and Innovation (DTI) course. DTP as a joint project is facilitated by faculty from different disciplines. Students have to demonstrate how different disciplines have influenced their design project. DesCA was introduced in the planning of the project to identify competencies needed for DTP and overlay these onto the existing course schedule. The results of this case study suggests that DesCA, as a competency-based approach, provides a common language between faculty of different disciplines and is an effective means: to gain a common understanding of the required competencies; to obtain coherence between courses in an interdisciplinary curriculum; and to form the basis for assessment. This should allow for a more coherent and integrated approach to design education, which is essential for producing graduates with a broad range of knowledge and skills and attitudes to tackle complex global challenges.

A new narrative and approach to address the unprecedented challenges faced by society on a global scale is urgently needed. The concept of sustainability is deemed inadequate, and a shift towards regenerative design and development processes is proposed. Regenerative Design (RD) is presented as a systemic and ecological action that seeks to co-evolve with nature and reverse the degeneration of the earth's natural systems. The article proposes a new interdisciplinary engineering and design education program from a regenerative approach at Tecnologico de Monterrey, which involves community participation, ethnographic tools, and design charrettes. The program, in a minor degree format, aims to co-design human structures and systems that can co-evolve with living systems, value the relationship between human systems and the natural ecosystem, and create positive and abundant futures. Success cases are presented to exemplify the application of the methodology.

Purpose:

Sustainability transitions are not hindered by technological barriers but above all by the lack of well-qualified people. Educating the next generation of engineers and product designers is therefore more important than ever. However, a traditional widely used model of Instruction and evaluation is not sufficient to prepare this next generation for the demands of society. It is appropriate that curricula should be adapted. If necessary, in a disruptive way.

The question is of how students and lecturers of Engineering and Product Design can participate on an equal basis in an educational module in which students prepare for a role in society that is in shock. To propel students and lecturers in a new direction a disruptive educational innovation has been designed and tested over a period of six years.

Purpose of this paper is to give individuals and organisations involved in higher education insight into a new method of education based on new values such as student agency, equal partnership, partnership learning communities, significant learning experience, and the strong belief students have the capacity and the willingness to positively influence their own lives and environment.

Method:

The method used is design-oriented scientific research. We conducted a single case study, an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case within a real-world context namely a disruptive education (service) innovation at Department of Engineering at Technical Faculty of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands).

Results:

The result is an exceptional example of education innovation under the engineer’s motto 'There has to be a better way'. It turns the traditional education model upside down. During their graduating year EPD students can participate in a future excellent program (10ECTS). After a kick-off, students and lecturers are transformed in equal partners in an innovation consultancy firm with a passion for engineering and product design. In 10 weeks, they explore their emotionally intrinsic values that enables students to accomplish great things and to experience meaning in their lives and work. It leads to a significant learning experience for students.

The results of our innovative way of new engineering education are extremely useful for students and lecturers, who are involved in a EPD Bsc-program.

Relevance to the theme of the conference

The aim of our disruptive education innovation is to help students (and graduates) address current and future challenges. They learn to act, to take responsibility at different levels (firm-, team-, and personal level), develop leadership skills, and to be able to switch between a holistic view at system level and product and service level vice versa. They are aware of the importance of their student-agency, and co-agency. Student agency can be exercised in moral, social, economic, creative context. As such our education innovation fits seamlessly within the theme ‘Responsible Innovation for Global Co-habitation’.

It is a great opportunity to share our new perspective on design education with other educators, practitioners and students from engineering and product design fields during the E&PDE 2023 conference.