Integrated Design Offers New Perspective in Design Education

Integrated Design Project is a course at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, in which the integrated product design team delivers a new product design concept for a company. The design team consists of six students, two from each graduation subject offered by the faculty Integrated Product design, Design for Interaction and Strategic Product Design. The team communicates with the company and a supervisor from the faculty. “Embodiment Design, designing with materials, manufacturing and geometry to fulfill a new function or upgrading the function” can help shorten the design time in the front end of the product development. Design with X offers possibilities for supporting the design process. The project teams receive an assignment from a company to design a product. The design team uses their preferred design tools. However, collaboration with the other design team member is of great influence on the quality and ‘depth’ of the ideas. These design tools include sketching, movie making, 3D modelling, etc. After the selection of the most promising design, a virtual prototype can be created but also a physical model to support the product concept. The project teams finish their projects by a presentation of the product design by means of several models and the business plan. The project results depend on the communication, the design method and models which should lead to improving the efficiency, reducing the design time or improving the product performance.