Continuing Education and Personalization of Design Methods to Improve their Acceptance in Practice – An Explorative Study

Abstract

One possibility to establish and foster efficient method transfer from academia to industry is via the heads of professional designers and design students. The transfer and use of design methods in a sustainable way is related to the methods’ acceptance by the user which is accompanied by many challenges. Educational concepts and design method adaptions have been chosen as decisive control parameters among many others in order to understand and evaluate how these can influence the acceptance of design methods in industry. An interview study to gain an understanding of the rationale of educational needs of engineers has been conducted to enrich existing literature in this area. The evaluation of feedback from academia-industry cooperation revealed specific challenges accompanied with educational concepts for modularization design methods. Based on these findings, an adaption was developed and an experiment study was conducted with students as future designers to decode variable factors in design training, gain qualitative feedback to a specific adaption and gain an understanding for the conditions and limitations of an experimental study. Joint conclusion reveals the need for improved education in method transfer and adaptions of the design methods to user-specific needs and paved the way for a series of experiments with various treatments of study participants regarding different personalized adaptions in design methods.