Fully Integrating Industrial Design into Engineering Education

Industrial design is an inseparable component of a product’s quality. Industrial design’s content, organisation and personnel must be integrated into product development in order to achieve an ideal product. In this process, designers and engineers share a common goal, an ideal product. Their differing tasks and interests frequently cause problems, usually resulting from miscommunication and lack of knowledge about the other party’s discipline. An opportunity to improve this relationship can be found in the education of product developers: in this paper an integrated major for industrial design engineers. This internationally common interdisciplinary education exists at only a few German universities. The Technische Universitaet Dresden has been one of them for almost 50 years. Particularly in light of the introduction of consecutive degrees to German universities, we have investigated international academic design education within engineering. There are many different educational models for industrial design within engineering education, in different countries. An array of positive and less positive trends can be observed. These insights should be considered in the upcoming changes to education programmes at the TU Dresden.