Conference Agenda

This paper narrates outcomes from an undergraduate first-year project-based learning studio in industrial design, which intends to democratize virtual reality and helps to rethink design education and professional practice for current and future challenges. The work fits in a more significant framework researching how technology can facilitate collaboration, co-habitation, and sustainability with co-present participants who are distributed globally. Particularly, virtual reality’s capacity to collapse the traditional staged design process into a singularity of simultaneous ideation, prototyping, testing, and production. New paradigms emerged at the start of the century; growth based on input-output mass manufacturing gave way to an agile software and knowledge-based economy. Twenty years on, education still needs to grasp how digitalization is progressively dematerializing the physical design artifact into algorithmic interactions for design innovation and production. The transformation is not perfect since technology has limitations. Diffusion problems (e.g., cost, supply) divide the haves and have-nots in society. Acquisition of the latest technology without adequate acculturation also results in individuals’ incapacity to upgrade their education and professional practice and hinders their social mobility.

The first author took on coordination of the subject at the start of the Covid-19 epidemic in 2021. This presented unique challenges. Australia’s strict lockdown regulations forced us to teach students remotely online without the support of our university workshop and tools for two years. Students also felt insecure about their interests, capacity, and skills because they had just started university. The premise for the subject was that the 80-year-old undelivered promise on the benefits of virtual reality would only be possible if we made it accessible to all with their mobile phones, and we capitalized on their high-school leavers’ sense of adventure. The topic was to create a controller to draw, interact and navigate in three degrees of freedom (3DoF) virtual environment and an app based on five pillars. Free and open-source software (FOSS) that students could download from their homes. Heuristics promoted an evolutionary process of experimentation and testing of ideas and designs with no fear of failure. A gaming approach promoted the learning of coding and trialing through play. Critical making instilled in students that modern industrial design is the result of hands-on exploration with digital and physical components. And critical pedagogy challenged the master apprentice and atelier status quo with students’ exploration, knowledge generation, and ownership that builds self-reliance and self-actualization. Students built confidence and design research skills with three assignments. From benchmarking, auditing, and user research to experimental ideation and testing, and finally the production of a working prototype as a minimum value proposition, which they tested and measured for successful results and shortcomings. Three years on and back to campus, outcomes might enlighten readers, since these demonstrate reliability that survived the challenge of Covid-19 lockdowns, Students Feedback on Subject (SFS) surveys show that the subject is popular among students, who end the semester analyzing their user experience and testing their controllers by playing games individually and against each other.

This paper presents a longitudinal study over more than ten years with more than 500 students following the implementation and evaluation of peer review and self-assessment. By peer review, students spend time reading and assessing other people's work, learning to determine what is good and bad (Gibbs 1999). Peer review can also be combined with self-assessment. Boud (2013) highlights that self-assessment contains two parts, where the first part is often neglected:

• The involvement of students in identifying standards and/or criteria to apply to their work

• Making judgements about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards

The second part may be useful for developing self-assessment skills. To fully embrace the idea of self-assessment, it is vital to teach students the characteristics of good work, or as Boud states: "It requires them to consider what are the characteristics of, say, a good essay or practical work and to apply this to their own work" Boud (2013, p. 12).

The implementation of peer review and self-assessment has been done in a third-year capstone design course. The aim is to integrate knowledge and skills acquired previously in the program and focus on improving their teamwork and interpersonal skills in a product design project.

In the course, students work in small teams (3-4 students) that go through a design process with four phases. Students know when and what they should deliver at each stage gate, and then it's up to them to decide which methods are suitable for performing the design. After each phase, students present their progress and receive critique during four design reviews. They also produce a 4-page written Process Memo (PM). The course ends with a presentation and documentation of the final concept. For each phase, a facilitated peer review and formative feedback from the teaching team are used to improve the written process memos. In 2016, we introduced self-assessment, where students also had to assess their own work. Inspired by the work from Boud (2013), we recently introduced a part where the students identify and develop their own criteria to assess their own work.

Feedback shows that most students appreciate the peer review sessions and believe it has improved the quality of the written documentation. The feedback also highlights that students think that the feedback from others is not the essential part; by reading others' documentation, they gain a better understanding of how good documentation is written. In agreement with many other studies (Taras, 2001), the student also appreciates the effort to assess their work. It is also interesting to see that students have been very good at assessing their capabilities and effort over the last five years. The difference between the self-assessment and teachers' final assessment was about 5%.

Boud, D. (2013). Enhancing learning through self-assessment.

Gibbs, G. (1999). Using Assessment Strategically to Change the Way Students Learn. Assessment Matters in Higher Education: Choosing and Using Diverse Approaches, 41.

Taras, M (2001) The Use of Tutor Feedback and Student Self- assessment in Summative Assessment

Achieving a sustainable and climate-neutral world is a social and complex technological task. Engineering designers therefore play a vital role as their technological developments may require the use of resources on a large scale. However, these developments are also driving factors for the transformation towards a more sustainable future.

This transformation requires capable, specifically trained engineers who are able to take sustainable aspects during the product development process into account. This in turn requires basic knowledge in the field of sustainability, which should students should be introduced to in engineering education.

But what are the core competencies in engineering education related to sustainability that should definitely not be missing? In this paper we examine which competence models of sustainability are described in the literature and which can be directly adapted for engineering education. Using the example of the course "Sustainable material selection and product development" at the University of Rostock, we present a way to assess whether our teaching of these competencies has been successful

While there are examples of public discourse around responsible innovation in science, technology, and engineering, less exists on public discussion in the field of responsible design. Without creating space for this to happen, how can design educators stay abreast of the contemporary perspectives of the societies they wish their students to serve?

Using a single case study methodology, we describe a snapshot safari activity which convened a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to reflect on and discuss design exhibits and their relation to social innovation. We propose this activity as a conceptual model for convening new forms of publics around exhibited work, enabling critical discourse on different responsible design perspectives. We believe this model could form the basis of further active research ultimately supporting universities to stay contemporary in their relationship with society through a better understanding how others understand responsible design and helping design pedagogy nurture the responsible designers the modern world needs.

Learning the use of machinery for the transformation of materials, such as wood and metal, continues to be an important part of the training of architecture and industrial design students, due to the manufacture of models and prototypes. The teaching-learning process of this type of equipment has always been face-to-face, with minimal interaction and attention from the students, to learn the sequence of operation and security measures.

On the other hand, and due to the return to 100% face-to-face classes for more than a year (due to the drop in COVID 19 infections), the development and implementation of learning activities with the support of virtual reality technologies is increasingly used in the training of design and engineering students at a professional level.

It is for this reason that a virtual environment was developed to support the learning of the most dangerous machines for the transformation of wood and metal. This environment, installed in the VR rooms of the Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Querétaro, Mexico, has allowed greater immersion, interaction and feedback in learning the aspects of use and safety of the aforementioned machines. The objective of this virtual environment is to be an effective complement to face-to-face training, allowing learning in a more participatory and safe way.

This work presents the structure of the platform's database and the first results of the implementation of this virtual environment, carried out in the February-June 2022 semester, with the support of first and second year design students.