A PILOT STUDY: A CASE STUDY OF DESIGN TEACHING APPLYING THE INTERNET CROWDSOURCING TECHNOLOGY FOR UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDENTS

Abstract

Since the design education system was firstly established and spread to the public by Bauhaus in Weimar, year of 1919, people began to realise the necessity and rationality of design education in various design domains. Currently, design has strongly combined with the new emerged Internet technologies (i.e., crowdsourcing technology), and recent research results suggested that crowdsourcing design method (i.e., Crowdsourced Design Framework) provides innovations for design. Consequently, the teaching of crowdsourced design method for the undergraduate design students has become increasingly important. Unfortunately, at present, it was hardly found this application in the current design course module. In this paper, the authors firstly investigated the application of crowdsourced design method (i.e., Crowdsourced Design Framework) for undergraduate students in the course of Industrial Design. This paper is structured by 5 sections. Section 1 gives a brief introduction of the development of design education, Internet crowdsourcing technology and the latest related research findings on it. In Section 2, authors illustrate a workflow showing the general design teaching process for design methods teaching applying the Crowdsourced Design (cDesign) Framework. Section 3 shows a case study based on the cDesign Framework design teaching process for the group design projects for 2nd year undergraduate Industrial Design students in Sichuan University. Students’ design results were evaluated by design experts, and the evaluation results are listed and discussed by the authors in Section 4. This paper ends by Section 5 as the conclusion, limitation and the future work. The suggestions of the results in this paper are as follows. First, the design outputs of the students’ group design projects were successfully improved by using the cDesign Framework. Second, students experienced the power of crowdsourcing technology during their design process. Last but not the least, this investigation firstly applied the one of the latest design methods to undergraduate design students. It is worth introducing the latest research results in design to students, which potentially helps them understand how design research changes our life.