This article aims to expand our knowledge on interdisciplinary design education by focusing on team development, which has remained a less explored aspect of interdisciplinary collaboration so far. An interdisciplinary design studio course, Collaborative Design, for food engineering and industrial design students in higher education provides the…

While teamwork has been a central concern in engineering education, little research has systematically examined how conflict is managed in engineering teams of students. Socio-constructivism provides a solid base to explain how teamwork can foster innovation through the use of cultural artifacts, such as "boundary objects." The purpose…

Empathy is seen as essential for user-centered design and thus needs to be taken into consideration in design education. Personas are a design method that is meant to promote empathy with users and are also used to foster an empathic design approach in educational settings. Empathic involvement is considered to be particularly important to…

The aim of this paper is to analyze what generic competencies at the "Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya" (UPC BarcelonaTech) are most evaluated by the teaching staff belonging to the first curricular block of industrial engineering degree courses at the Barcelona "Escola Universitaria d'Enginyeria Técnica Industrial," and…

The growing interest in the collaborative design education for innovation has mainly been concerned with students and learning outcomes. We know less about the collaboration between the tutors who teach interdisciplinary design courses. Addressing this gap, this article explores the effect of space on the interdisciplinary collaboration between…

The competence-based education recently launched in Spanish universities presents a set of abilities and skills that are difficult to teach to students in higher and more technologically-oriented grades. In this paper, a teaching intervention that is based on design methodologies is proposed, to upgrade the competitive capacities of computer…

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach grounded in the processes of inquiry and reasoning towards generating innovative artifacts, systems and solutions. The approach is well characterized in the context of learning natural sciences in secondary education. Less is known, however, of its characteristics in the context of higher…