Abstract
In recent years, engineering education focuses on cultivating the students’ ability of product manufacturing and industrial innovation, while industrial design education offers fantastic thinking and logical method. As a result, many universities have opened the multidisciplinary course of product design engineering. By investigating the settings of the course, it is found that its main idea is innovative design thinking, which is the reflection of the industrial design method. This paper tries to discuss the feasibility of integrating the industrial design method into engineering education, with the purpose of inspiring the design thinking of the students. The authors attended the Summer Program for Innovative Engineering Design (SPIED) for two years, and gained some experience of teaching the engineering students in this program. In this paper, the project and needs of engineering students are analyzed by taking the course in SPIED 2015 as an example. The authors guided the students to find the possible innovative points with industrial design method in the class. Furthermore, a questionnaire survey was conducted for evaluating the teaching effect. According to the survey result, the students showed more interests in the innovative thinking training, and the user research and the course could significantly improve their innovative thinking.
Highlights
With the development of the manufacturing industry, a higher requirement has been put forward for the traditional engineering education, and the integration of research with practice has become a large challenge
An experiment was performed in an international engineering design education program, and a method was presented for helping the engineering students find the possible innovative points during the project process
The first period of the industrial design started from the middle 19th century, which witnessed the transition from the handicraft industry to the mechanical industry; in the 20th century, the Bauhaus proposed the principle that form follows function–meaning a problem should be solved in a systemic and logical way–which marked the beginning of the second period of industrial design; and in 1981, with the development of the manufacturing industry, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID)(6) defined industrial design as a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production
Summary
With the development of the manufacturing industry, a higher requirement has been put forward for the traditional engineering education, and the integration of research with practice has become a large challenge. An experiment was performed in an international engineering design education program, and a method was presented for helping the engineering students find the possible innovative points during the project process. This international engineering design education program is a two-week workshop, which involves students from different engineering majors and countries. The purpose of this program is to make innovative design for solving the actual problems in this era or in the future. The engineering students usually ignored this fact They don’t know why the “thinking” is important and how to think during the design process. Spinach, prosciutto, onion, Factors in the problem oil, salt, pepper, and broth
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