Collaborative Projects - a global survey

Year: 2009
Editor: Clarke, A, Ion, W, McMahon, C and Hogarth, P
Author: Eriksen, Kaare
Section: COLLABORATIVE DESIGN
Page(s): 26-31

Abstract

Collaborative projects between educational institutions and external partners seem to be popular ways to prepare industrial design and design engineering students for professional practice. Such projects are set up all over the world and this paper describes the result of a survey that focus on the practice and experience from 12 such educations covering several continents. Teachers and study managers have been asked to describe the content and direction of their academic programs and how they organize and structure student's participation in collaborative projects. They also respond to questions regarding the benefits and disadvantages in project cooperation with external partners like companies. The survey shows that in general the industrial design and design engineering programs highly appreciate cooperative projects with external partners and all the programs run such projects during the 4th year of study. Big differences in student group sizes, company size etc. show differences between the educational practice in different institutions.

Keywords: Collaborative projects, industrial design program, design engineering program, design education, global survey