Design and Technology Education (LJMU)
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Problem Based Learning: Developing competency in knowledge integration in health design
Different communities, organizations, and people hold different views on their own and others’ wellbeing. It is often challenging to balance different perspectives during the design process when the truth of medicine is competing with the truth of social media and the everyday experience of wellbeing of patients, caregivers, family and friends. In the context of the Masters of Health Design at OCAD University (OCAD U), we develop students’ competency in working with truth through challenging students to engage with multiple ‘truths’ in the design process, engaging deliberately in identifying and working with multiple truth regimes as part of a problem based learning approach. This includes how truth regimes impact the understanding of a challenge area, techniques for engaging with stakeholders, communicating and developing concepts, and the process of seeking and working with feedback for refining and iterating, and finally in communicating project solutions. By engaging in problem based learning, students are exposed to the real challenges of different stakeholder perspectives and in particular how different truth regimes serve to impact what counts as legitimate knowledge and legitimate knowledge representation
Decision Making in Product Design: Bridging the gap between inception and reality
Product Design in the modern world is a complex multifaceted discipline comprising of many skills and applications. It also operates in broader cross-disciplinary contexts within direct teams, while also contributing to the strategic business processes of commercial enterprises, government/councils and not for profit organizations. It is no longer a purely creative problem solving activity where a good idea or innovation is enough to push forward a new product. For the majority of the design profession the days of design on the back of an envelope are gone. Today design is a structured activity with recognizable and repeatable methodologies and processes. Within this the profession is acknowledging and aligning with the principles of business management. A consequence of this is that designers are being asked to undertake increasingly complex challenges where the consequences of making good or bad decisions have far reaching implications for the future of an organization. Education needs to train designers to recognize and operate in these complex situations. As a response Universities now include project or design management within curriculum.‘The new program should equip the students with not only the ability to design, manufacture and test design solutions; but also with a firm knowledge of business strategy’ (Guo, 2015)However the authors have recognized a gap within the profession and education for a more structured and validated approach to decision making within the design process (Norman, 2010). This paper outlines a pilot study within a student project whereby professional decision making tools are introduced to final year students and used to validate selection of appropriate designs from initial feasibility concepts against a hierarchy of criteria. Would designers see the value or would they perceive it as an intrusive addition to what they believe should be an intuitive process
Design Divergence Using the Morphological Chart
This paper investigates the effectiveness of the morphological chart method in design divergence. The literature presents the morphological chart as an engineering design method that does not particularly aim novelty, but instead gathers possible means for fulfilling the independently decomposed sub-functions of a product. On the other hand, implementations of this method in design education has shown that this method offers the possibility of design exploration for groups of interrelated sub-functions. Accordingly, this widens the solution space and encourages designers to think on the consequences of their design decisions while generating ideas, hence allowing situated design divergence to take place. The paper presents the findings of a review carried out on twelve morphological charts completed in groups, containing a total of 686 sub-solution sketches made for a pool of 21 sub-functions. The charts were reviewed as a whole in terms of group performance in idea generation for a decomposed design problem. Then the sub-solution ideas were grouped according to sub-functions and were reviewed in terms of idea content. It was seen that a background preparation with product trials, 3D exploration of product configuration, and experience in using the morphological chart method, affected the number of cells that the participants completed. Besides, several factors were found to influence the ways in which participants filled in the morphological charts. The reviews revealed eleven factors affecting design divergence using the morphological chart method, grouping under the headings of: preparations, group dynamics, boundaries of sub-functions, and interrelations of product components. In addition, thirteen strategies were identified that participants followed for idea generation using the morphological chart method, grouping under the headings of: beginning idea generation, ensuring effective idea generation, exploring ideas, diversifying ideas and representing ideas
Pathway to support the adoption of PBL in open data education
Governments, public sector institutions and organisations have started releasing and sharing information in the format of open data (OD). The opportunities to create and innovate with OD will continue to grow, and there is an expectation that educational institutions will produce competitive graduates with OD skills. A key question arising from these expectations is how to equip the workforce and students with OD skills. Based on literature from education design and design fields and an empirical analysis of different OD training activities in five European countries, we identified a need to support OD teachers by developing a visual, structured and simple model to guide them through the adaption and implementation of PBL and foster their competences as learning designers, thus the paper proposes an OD–Problem-Based Learning (PBL) pathway model. The pathway model aims to guide educators by structuring the design process of OD training activities and promotes design skills among teachers. The pathway model comprises five main steps: understand, review, design, teach and reflect. Each step provides guidelines on how to plan an OD course
The Use of Metaphors as a Parametric Design Teaching Model: A Case Study
Teaching methodologies for parametric design are being researched all over the world, since there is a growing demand for computer programming logic and its fabrication process in architectural education. The computer programming courses in architectural education are usually done in a very short period of time, and so students have no chance to create their own designs. This paper describes a course in which metaphors are used as a teaching methodology in parametric design, in order to let students create their own designs and learn the basic elements of parametric programming language in a short period of time with deductive reasoning. In this course, it was intended to teach visual programming language to undergraduates. Advancing under the metaphor theoretical framework, the students obtained experience in achieving form-finding process for their projects in accord with the certain constraints. Using this methodology, the students, who experienced all design stages from 3D modeling to the digital fabrication, additionally were able to develop their ability for versatile thinking and the use of more than one tool in combination, in the early years of their architectural education
Design for Manufacture (DFM) within Professional Practice and its Relationship to Design Education
This research set out to assess the importance of Design for Manufacture (DFM) within the industrial design process, understanding how it is taught, and comparing this to the requirements of professional practice. A mixed methods approach was applied in, collecting a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data through two questionnaires. The first questionnaire was directed at current and graduate students from the Industrial Design (ID) and Product Design (PD) courses at Loughborough Design School. The second questionnaire targeted design companies that had previously employed Loughborough students in either placement or graduate roles. The results of the two questionnaires were then analysed individually before comparing a selection ofdirectly corresponding results.The results from the primary research showed that both students and companies agreed that DFM was a key skill utilised within professional practice. In both cases, DFM was regarded as more important than sketching and sketch rendering, supporting findings within the literature review that the role of the designer has changed. It was discovered that the main benefit of a professional designer implicating DFM during the design process was an overall reduction in cost. It may be concluded that, although the teaching of DFM at Loughborough Design School supplied the students with some knowledge, it does not entirely meet the requirements for professional design practice
Review of Curriculum Development for University-Industry Collaborations with a Comparative Analysis on Master of Industrial Product Design Education
University-industry collaboration (UIC) provides not only effective training for students but also knowledge production in universities for industry to contribute to the economy (Bektaş & Tayauova, 2013). The paper proposes to analyse reasons for deficiencies in UIC with a comparative analysis of the curriculum of the industrial design (ID) department of Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH) and Linnaeus University (LNU), and taking feedback from industry. As a comparative analysis of curriculum, ID programmes in IZTECH and LNU were examined to understand differences and similarities. To develop UIC for IZTECH, LNU was accepted as an example, and then the two institutions were compared according to each curriculum. For comparison of ID courses, the taxonomy method in the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) Handbook 2014-2015 was used. There are three categories for design courses, which are professional design practice (PDP), design studies (DS), and design thinking (DT). Within the scope of curriculum development for university-industry collaboration, feedback was taken from companies that have a design department or are an employer of new ID graduates. For this purpose, surveys were sent to different companies. As a result of curriculum analysis and a survey with industry, courses that need to be developed belong to PDP and DT groups, which are more practice and teamwork based. A solution can be adding new courses to curriculum that contain more teamwork and innovative and collaborative activities. Also, content of existing courses can be developed on DT characteristics
Developing Empathy for Older Users in Undergraduate Design Students
Empathy has been recognised as a key skill by practicing designers. With rapid changes to inclusivity and accessibility in the transport sector, student designers need to appreciate and understand the way in which people of differing abilities are able to engage with and interact with transport. They need to not only develop an understanding of older and vulnerable users - how they experience products, vehicles, services and systems - but also have the confidence to try out new ways of finding information and gaining ‘authentic experiences’ to feed into their designs. Although empathic design is encouraged, there is often little opportunity for this to occur in a full educational curriculum.To meet this need, the authors are developing a framework for teaching empathic design using low fidelity, experiential prototypes – using material that is easily available and affordable to design students. This paper reports the first steps towards designing a brief intervention to increase the empathic horizon of transport design students. It concludes with recommendations on how to create high quality learning experiences for students that will enable enhanced empathic design outcomes as they embark upon design careers