Sketching-related activities are considered as an essential form of communication in the early phases of a design process. In the presented study, it is argued that both the sketching and the sketch-related verbalisations are reflected in the level of elaboration of the sketching outputs. Hence, a protocol study was conducted to analyse the frequencies of different sketching-related activities during team conceptual design sessions and the associated levels of elaboration for each of the sketching outputs in the form of concept drawings. The results show that although teams generate sketches of various number, complexity and clarity, there exist commonalities across the studied experiment sessions. For example, teams share a pattern of developing solutions without transformations or using lateral transformations within the first part of the sessions and using vertical transformations to produce final concepts towards the end of the sessions. Moreover, teams used associated sketch elements to start drawing new sketches and then alternated to other activities, most of all verbal explanation, for the sake of elaboration and better understanding.

Textual idea data from online crowdsourcing contains rich information of the concepts that underlie the original ideas and can be recombined to generate new ideas. But representing such information in a way that can stimulate new ideas is not a trivial task, because crowdsourced data are often vast and in unstructured natural languages. This paper introduces a method that uses natural language processing to summarize a massive number of idea descriptions and represents the underlying concept space as word clouds with a core-periphery structure to inspire recombinations of such concepts into new ideas. We report the use of this method in a real public-sector-sponsored project to explore ideas for future transportation system design. Word clouds that represent the concept space underlying original crowdsourced ideas are used as ideation aids and stimulate many new ideas with varied novelty, usefulness and feasibility. The new ideas suggest that the proposed method helps expand the idea space. Our analysis of these ideas and a survey with the designers who generated them shed light on how people perceive and use the word clouds as ideation aids and suggest future research directions.

Framing is a crucial skill for connecting problem and solution spaces in the creative design process, both for individuals and teams. Frames are implicit in individuals’ cognitive thinking, but the creation of shared frames plays a vital role in collaborative design. Many studies have attempted to describe the framing process, but little is still known about how to support designers in framing, specifically in teams. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring the connection between sketching and framing within interdisciplinary teams. Following a qualitative and explorative approach, we have investigated the process and outcome of five interdisciplinary teams. We identified that sketching assists in the creation and elaboration of frames. Furthermore, in tandem with discussion and reflection, sketching helps increase the chance of a frame to survive within the design process. Our findings have practical and educational implications for improving the creative design process in interdisciplinary teams.

While design is fundamental to engineering practice, modern training in engineering design has almost exclusively moved to the classroom, providing students little exposure to holistic, real-world design experiences that are well-integrated with the rest of the academic curriculum. In this paper, we perform a short review of how the model of engineering education in Canada has evolved over the last two centuries, identify the current deficiencies in teaching design in engineering curricula, and review how Chairs in Design Engineering at various Canadian engineering schools have tackled this identified need. We then describe in detail how this problem is being addressed at the University of Waterloo through Engineering Design Days. This approach is presented as a design “lattice” around which other curriculum threads (math, natural sciences, engineering science, design etc.) can grow in an integrated way. Different Design Days examples from various engineering programs are described to illustrate the general structure. We conclude by assessing the program's impact and identifying opportunities for future development and assessment of the program's effectiveness.

Serious games (SGs) as a new educational format have gained interest among many scholars from diverse fields. SGs seem to be useful tools for teaching innovation processes (IP) as they guarantee intrinsic motivation and provide situated learning. So far, there is no guideline on designing IP games and lowering their development time while ensuring their effectiveness. To fill this gap, we should first analyse the existing IP games with evaluation methods and synthesise their commonalities. Numerous methods have been put forward in the literature to assess digital SGs; however, most of the SGs for IP are board games. That is why we explore in this paper the use of Serious Game Design Assessment (SGDA) framework to analyse IP board games. According to the case study on an open innovation board game, we suggest applying this method to examine the a priori relevance of game elements (components that make up a game system). Moreover, we make recommendations to complement the SGDA framework with Game and Learning Mechanics, and real-world information. This contribution should help designers transform traditional educational supports into serious board games for teaching IP.

Authentic learning is an approach to teaching where the learning is embedded in a real world context, in real situations or simulations, and offers students opportunities for problem solving challenges much like they will encounter in real life. This paper discusses and reflects upon the development a course designed to teach Socially Responsible Design approaches, methods and tools to Product Design Engineering students using global projects. Our research question was to investigate if this Socially Responsible Design course, it's structure, delivery, learning activities and assessments combined to deliver an authentic learning experience. Through informal interviews with staff, review of student reflections, review of university student feedback comments and consideration of final outcomes, all within the framework of Herrington and Oliver's nine elements of authentic learning, we found that this course did provide an authentic learning experience for many reasons. This study offers academics a frame work for reviewing existing and future courses with a view to creating or enhancing authentic learning experiences using project based learning

The emerging field of biomimicry and learning to design with and for nature has expanded in recent years through a diversity of educational programs. Inspiration following natural forms may give the appearance of being sustainable, but the question remains, how sustainable is it? Misunderstanding the function of these forms may leave designers with products not as sustainable as desired. Biomimicry education addresses these issues by integrating three essential elements into their design thinking phases and by using analogical transfer while doing so. This field learns from nature as model, nature as measure, and nature as mentor, throughout the design process. Through examination, analyses and verification of students designs and reflective processes at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, this research considers natures analogies in educational factors, determining which elements are influential when incorporating biomimicry into design education.

The early (pre-requirement) stages of product development can provide relevant insights into the creative design process. At these stages, the communication of ideas during the prototyping process can serve as a rich source for information. In this paper, we attempt to document physical prototypes generated during the design process. We describe the design and preliminary testing of Protobooth Oulu: a system that can be used for documenting the process of prototyping products through capturing process output 'snapshots' in time at the early stages of product development. Our primary motivation is to facilitate documentation and reflection from an educational perspective. We tested the system during a course on digital fabrication in a FabLab environment, where ten teams documented their coursework over the course of six weeks. Managing to capture prototypes over time, analysis of the captured data showed evolution and major changes in the prototypes. Such data can be used for understanding the process of prototyping and consequently provide means to improve prototype and overall creative performance. We outline a future Protobooth system in terms of functionality.

At Polytechnics design & engineering students are taught about state-of-the-art technical knowledge. Students become qualified engineers and learn to innovate artifacts related to their domain.

Not taught is how to develop new engineering knowledge within a multidisciplinary context of stakeholders, companies and regulations. In short, students don't learn to innovate technology. What is taught today is the result of a technological innovation of yesterday. This is not sufficient for industry to innovatively deal with society's grand challenges.

The paper describes a project that aims to educate all TU Delft graduate students in the verb of innovating technology, that is, the development of new technologies from inventions in the labs to full- fledged application in business. Such along three dimensions: technical, human and business.

The educational portfolio consists of three modules in line with growth along Bloom's taxonomy and online materials on theoretical backbones. All modules apply the notion of technological innovation journeys (Tijo's). Tijo's are rich descriptions of the developmental journey of new technology and are based on inventions from the university's own labs.

During analysis in engineering design, systematic thinking errors - so-called cognitive biases - can lead to inaccurate understanding of the design problem. With a simplified version of the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses - ACH method and a simplified decision matrix, the confirmation bias in particular can be minimized. To evaluate this method, it was taught to experienced design engineers and mechanical engineering students. During the experimental evaluation the participants analysed a real technical problem. The procedures and results were compared with a previously conducted study with the same task. The design engineers have not changed their approaches and could not further improve their analysis success. The students profited considerably from the training. They have mentioned twice as much supporting evidence and six times as much contradicting evidence through the training indicating a more extensive analysis. As a result, the students showed significantly fewer signs of confirmation bias than without training. The findings suggest that debiasing strategies should be introduced early in engineering design education.

In this study, we discuss a structure for developing the skills and competencies required by the learning framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for future education. Given the broad range of skills and the numerous competencies required to meet the demands of future society, the proposed wider and higher-level framework is based on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and design, and mathematics) and addresses the limitations of conventional computational thinking by tackling some of the skills and competencies. This is done by proposing the enrichment of STEAM educational approach with art thinking, which may be defined as a creative human-centred discovery process. To explore such enrichment, we conducted a workshop on art thinking. The motivation of the workshop was to explore whether art thinking can overcome some of the limitations of computational thinking regarding future education in the OECD learning framework. We discuss STEAM as focusing on design creativity competency, and we outline the development of educational activities such as workshops to promote competencies in the perspective of OECD framework.

This paper presents an educational game fostering a new experience-based approach to teaching knowledge transfer using a codification strategy alone. The goal is to address and highlight some common issues and challenges that occur during knowledge transfer in product development and that are often difficult for especially students to grasp through exclusively a theoretical teaching approach. The game is introduced to 60 students in the final year of their Master's curriculum. In parallel, the game has been applied in a similar setting in a comparable higher educational institution, as well as in a product development organization.

“Sometimes you win—other times you lose and learn.”

Teaching “calm technology” and “smart materials” as prospective trends in product design is the motivation of the educational workshop presented in this paper. Materials can trigger creative thinking. Indeed, concepts can be generated ideas that come from the encounter with a material showing the material's unexpressed potential. However, a smart material is a complex hybrid object. It is a highly technical matter that requires years of R&D to be developed and matured. It is also a highly social matter, that blurs the traditional boundary between matter and function in a product, creates an experience, and enhances sensations. The workshop presented in this paper is an opportunity for the students to analyze the complexity of user experience related to ambient devices using smart materials. In order to provide a guideline to perform this analysis, an approach based on heuristic evaluation is proposed to the students.

This paper aims at assessing the impact of inventive design education on students attending a class on Methods and Tools for Systematic Innovation. The study stems from the difficulty to understand how much personal inventive talent influences the final evaluation, especially in a context where students are asked to solve open problems, as conceptual design ones. To overcome the potential bias due to the individual talent, the authors propose to determine the impact of their teaching activity by means of an ex-ante/ex-post correlation analysis. Several cohorts of students along the years have been asked to solve some design problems at the beginning of the course, when no topics have been thought yet. An adapted creativity metrics enriched to map course contents measures the students' performance at the beginning ot the class (ex-ante). These results get correlated to the students' final grades (ex-post) in order to highlight areas where teaching has a stronger impact and those where talent remains predominant.

This paper describes an iterative approach to course design in an effort to improve the learner-centered conceptualization of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The research team built a (design research) MOOC prototype and used three measurement tools to gather user feedback. The authors categorized this feedback and translated it into 57 improvement tasks, which they implemented in the public version of the MOOC. They discuss the protoMOOC iteration approach, underline its applicability, and suggest it as a method for fellow MOOC designers.

The field of design research has been expanding into a wide diverse range of multidisciplinary topics. It takes substantial time for young researchers to attain a cumulative overview of state of the art on ever more complex methodologies. Teaching doctoral candidates in summer schools is an approach being taken by the design society to support them attaining an immersed understanding of a chosen research field as well as to help them formulate their own line of research. The aim for a new researcher is to form exchanges and collaborations with other researchers. The 'International Summer School on Product Architecture Design - PAD 2018' was such an effort, where 17 international PhD researchers and three international faculties met for a week and explored research in product architecture through hands-on exercises. We surveyed the researchers for effectiveness of the summer school and found that structure and concept of the summer school was effective for providing a background baseline of state of the art. We found there was a significant but less impact on individual participant´s research. We have yet to understand if the creation of collaborations among participants will occur.

Teachers' resources renewal is a critical aspect of design education. Design teachers update and renew their resources to keep their lectures and project topics up to date, in line with contemporary issues and societal changes, and to assure their lifelong learning and professional development. Yet, few studies were published on resource renewal process in design education. Researches usually focus on teaching resources and cultural capital qualification. This paper analyses the resource renewal process in design education. Our methodology comprehends the construction of a conceptual framework based on Environmental Scanning, which was studied through a qualitative study involving fifteen design teachers in France. Our results show that design teachers update and renew teaching resources according to their personal areas of interest and students' needs. Their renewal process is different depending on whether they are creating lectures and topics, they are working with other teachers or with external partners. Relationships and networks appear important, teachers rely on their network of colleagues, design practitioners and project partners to access emerging issues.

Reflection is an important component in design skill development that helps designers better understand their design problem, develop better solutions, and improve their design approaches. This study explored the information that a student design team reflected on as part of a needs finding experience and the outcomes from these reflections. During the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-in- action behavior as they used available data to form and iterate on explanatory hypotheses about potential community needs. After the needs finding experience, the team exhibited reflection-on-action behavior as they drew connections between their interview approaches and stakeholder responses and discussed changes they might make in the future. The team also identified situations where contextual factors of the stakeholder impacted their interviews, but during these reflections did not indicate how they might adapt their approaches to account for such factors in the future. These findings show that student designers can use reflection as a tool to improve their needs finding process but would benefit from pedagogical structures that might help them reflect more effectively.

This pilot study examines how design students comprehend collaborations with external organizations— the roles and involvement of different actors in a design process. The study looks at two undergraduate courses where a total of 33 design students collaborate with a municipality and governmental agency. Data focuses on the students' terminology in regard to the external organizations and is collected through questionnaires, voice recording, workshops and written assignments. The data analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, focusing on the word frequency and semantics of the terminology. The results show that the students were not used to working closely to external organizations. This is reflected in the prevalent use of the term “client” instead of “collaborative partner”. Not working closely with organizations nor users is reflected in the students’ inabilities to handle the complexities that emerge when working with multiple stakeholder and users. At the end of the paper, suggestions are made of ways to develop students’ comprehension of ways to involve external organizations and users in the design process.

Design methods are claimed to support designers but, although they are largely taught in academia, their industrial uptake is still lacking. Many reasons have been identified about this flaw and some potential suggestions have been proposed and discussed in literature to overcome the problem. However, a further evidence is that although many students learn such methods from years, they partially or totally abandon the learned methods in their professional careers. This could partially explain the gap between academic and industrial diffusion of design methods. Literature provides suggestions for improving the learning experience of students but different didactical contexts may need more tailored solutions. The work shown in this paper exploits the problem solving potentialities of the TRIZ toolset to provide hints for improving a course focused on teaching a systematic conceptual design method. A set of suggestions has been obtained together some guidelines for applying the considered TRIZ tools to other didactical contexts.