An ever-increasing array of design visualisation tools are available to designers. As such, design education is constantly challenged to keep up with these trends so that students are best equipped for entering industrial practice. This paper reports a study into the use of digital sketching, a relatively new digital visualisation tool. The study…

"Hybrid is here to stay!" If that is so, then how we educate design students and the techniques they learn need to work in a technology-driven online environment as well as face-to-face on campus. Learning codesign typically involves students being in a design studio environment where they create activities using tangible materials, for…

Universal design thinkers are needed now more than ever. The world is facing one humanitarian crisis after the other, forcing people to flee their homes and resettle elsewhere without knowing anything about the local language, traditions, and way of life. Moreover, an ageing population is in need of (housing) design that facilitates long-term…

University students often struggle with choosing a topic for their final projects due to the lack of a supporting and defining framework for said selection. Should the student be oriented toward reflecting on how each of the possible topics to choose from can become an impactful project in the short, mid and long run, maybe that selection becomes…

Few digital product development tools are used in industry and academia compared to their historic paper-based counterparts. This is surprising as many parts of the product development process have digitised such as communication and Computer-Aided Design. Therefore, a gap in knowledge was identified which informed the development of a novel…

Since the beginning of the 21st century, design education has been gaining momentum across disciplines as a means to equip students with skills relevant in the job market as well as to tackle wicked problems. One of the core assumptions behind integrating design education to other disciplines focuses on the need for hands-on and experiential…

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…

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,…

The aim of design education is that students learn to think and act like designers. However, the focus in the design studio is mainly on the design product, whereas the 'why and how' of the design process are barely addressed. A risk of learning by performing real-life tasks without addressing the skills involved, that is, without receiving…

A central part of basic engineering design education aims for imparting profound knowledge of how machine elements are designed and building an understanding about how they work in detail within a technical product. In this context, a basic challenge lies in teaching to analyse complex systems that are usually characterized by a high number of…

A wide range of design literature discusses the role of the studio and its related pedagogy in the development of design thinking. Scholars in a variety of design disciplines pose a number of factors that potentially affect this development process, but a full understanding of these factors as experienced from a critical pedagogy or student…

This study responds to calls to further investigate ways to make feedback more effective for students in the context of higher education. More specifically it scrutinizes the feedback practice, adapted to the exceptional reality of a partly on Campus, partly online semester-long Product-Service System (PSS) design project for first Master students…

This paper presents the findings of visual analyses conducted on 369 sketch ideas generated in three 6-3-5 visual brainstorming sessions by a total of 25 participants, following the same design brief. The motivation for the study was an interest in the thematic content of the ideas generated as groups, and the individual representation styles used…

This paper elaborates on how design judgement can be practiced in design education, as explored in several iterations of an advanced course in interaction design. The students were probed to address four separate design tasks based on distinct high-level intentions, i.e. to 1) take societal responsibility, 2) to generate profit, 3) to explore a…

This paper presents two studies in which an empirical approach was taken to understand and explain form generation and decisions taken in the design process. In particular, the activities addressing aesthetic aspects when exteriorising form ideas in the design process have been the focus of the present study. Diary methods were the starting point…