Integration of Industrial Design Method and Engineering Innovative Course

Abstract

At present, engineering education is faced with a lot of problems. It focuses on cultivating students’ ability of product manufacturing and industrial innovation. However, it lacks communications with other fields. Industrial design education o ff ers fantastic thinking and logical methods. As a result, many universities have opened the multi- disciplinary course about product design engineering. According to settings of the course, it is found that its main idea is innovative design thinking which reflects the industrial design method. This paper discusses the feasibility of integrating the industrial design method into engineering education, aiming to inspire the design thinking of the students. The authors attended the Summer Program for Innovative Engineering Design (SPIED) for two years, and gained some experience in teaching the engineering students during this program. In this paper, the project and needs of engineering students were analyzed with the course in SPIED 2015 as an example. The authors used industrial design to guide the students to find the possible innovative points. During the course, a questionnaire survey was conducted to evaluate the teaching e ff ect. The survey result shows that innovative thinking training was the most popular method for students. The design thinking course in the SPIED gave the students some new thinking modes. The industrial design course motivated interest of the students.