Conference Agenda

The rapid evolution of CAD technologies and their integration with product lifecycle management (PLM) systems poses significant challenges for experienced designers. Transitioning to new software often requires relearning workflows and adopting unfamiliar functionality, which can lead to productivity disruptions and frustration. To address this, the company ARTECH GmbH proposes an innovative e-learning course tailored for experienced designers, specifically designed to foster their mastery of new systems.

This paper explores the development and deployment of a training course designed to balance technical training with empathy for users' professional expertise and learning styles. The course uses human-centred methods to address the unique needs of experienced designers, recognizing their existing skills and emphasizing adaptive strategies rather than rote learning. Core training components include self-paced modules, interactive tutorials, and project-based learning, all aligned with real-world design challenges integrated with PLM systems.

A key focus of the course is the integration of the user experience throughout the lifecycle of products and services. Designers will be guided to understand how new CAD tools affect collaboration, prototyping and the eventual lifecycle management of designs. By simulating multi-user, multi-modal scenarios, the course promotes collaborative design thinking and enhances designers' ability to consider multiple perspectives and criteria in their workflows.

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Sketching is seen as a fundamental element of a design process which allows ambiguity to be maintained and facilitates the perception of new possibilities, re-interpretation and synthesis. Often it is crucial for exploring human aspects of design. At the same time contemporary engineering design education approaches typically do not include sketching explicitly and there are reports of students’ reluctance to sketch. To explore this contradiction interviews were conducted with three experienced engineering design professionals, focusing on how they used sketching while designing and compared them to student’s sketching practices, identified though sketch output analysis. Results show that sketching is still a part of the design processes of professionals, which is sometimes used in creative ways with computer aided design but is used less habitually in students’ work. This paper discusses potential reasons behind this and potential ways to reintroduce sketching to engineering education.

Reflection enables individuals to derive meaning from experiences. It is deeply ingrained in an empathic interaction that fosters a nuanced understanding of varied perspectives. While empathy is recognised as a transformative tool in design education, a limited number of studies explore students' empathy development. By leveraging Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities, including perspective-taking and emotion elicitation, combined with the innate human capacity for reflection, this research investigates a structured approach through a qualitative study to enhance design students’ empathy and integrate it into design education. Driven by the need for human-centred design (HCD) practices to foster more-than-human perspectives, participants were invited to step into the world of a tree using VR, followed by a self-reflective writing activity in which they recalled their thoughts and emotions during the virtual experience. This research introduces a novel method for eliciting augmented empathic experiences by heightening design students’ awareness of a unique perspective and deepening their insight into their personal experience. The method facilitates long-term evaluation of empathy responses, providing opportunities for sustained empathy development. By broadening students' understanding of diverse perspectives, this study lays the foundation for a new generation of human-centred design solutions that embed inclusive, social, and ecological values within design education.

The future in industry and academia collaborative models for fostering smart products and living areas will be more and more triggered by the human being and involving the user within digital tools. Integrating children as creator means an advanced step in the nearby future, not only from the economical point of view, because of the ‘war for fighting for talents around the world’, but also for profiting by the human centred, more emotional and sociological point of view for resilient living models. This scoping paper is showing – with the naïve beneficial view by children and their beloved digital creating items within immersive hybrid design spaces – that playing in design as experimenting (transgenerational) design could be more than one resilient factor for holding on humanities for STEM. Hybrid design education by children centred mixed media design spaces will have an impetus on participatory design that means integrative designing in more than one level. At the same time all participants will have an educational benefit by cooperation of human beings with AI design(ed) experiences memory.

Understanding human-centred design and developing products for diverse populations are crucial skills for product designers to develop. Many UK undergraduate product design students come from diverse backgrounds acquiring varying qualifications at school/college level which are usually further supplemented by Non-Exam Assessments (NEAs). These preparatory courses provide practical skills and theoretical knowledge but often overlook human-centred design and effective ideation/iteration. First-year students typically have limited experience designing for broader populations, usually designing products for themselves or family members. Early undergraduate education must therefore emphasize researching and designing for diverse population groups by connecting research activities to iterative design processes for continual improvement. This involves considering varying factors such as aesthetics, ergonomics, usability, manufacturability, cost, etc. This paper presents a case study on first-year BSc Product Design (BSc PD) students at [Anonymised University] that engage in two projects in the first 10 weeks of their undergraduate education. The first project involves redesigning a power tool using an iterative design process. Students choose one of three preset user personas and select a power tool (electric screwdriver, detail sander, or jigsaw) to redesign using a human-centred approach. The second project is a cardboard lighting project where students design a light for a home based on a user persona they formulate but are required to focus on diverse living populations. Key findings highlight how the quality of student outputs improve when they develop an understanding of product sectors while empathizing with users and identifying their needs using human centred design (HCD) and varying research methods.