An Investigation into a Digital Strategy for Industrial Design Education

Abstract

As the number of digital natives increases and the range of digital design tools / media continues to expand, it is timely to examine the potential for an entirely digital industrial design process that can be employed in practice and education. Following a literature review, a draft Digital Industrial Design (DID) strategy that focuses on the core design activities of sketching, drawing, model making, and prototyping was generated. A paper‐based, theoretical model was established and presented to graduating students, academics and practitioners. The results indicated that, while graduating students were interested in employing an approach based entirely on digital methods, the majority had doubts about its capacity to replace conventional and hybrid methods. The removal of paper‐based sketching, the conventional hands‐on experience when model making, and the cost of digital tools were identified as primary concerns. Although academics believed that the future of industrial design programmes would become increasingly digital, it was identified that current programmes were failing to exploit the opportunities afforded by these technologies fully.

Embedding Immersive Technologies Into Product Design Education: Students' Awareness of Virtual Reality as a Tool to Support the Development of Design Solutions

“…These results agree with those of Noor Aldoy & Mark Evans (2011), which showed that over 90% of respondents said that they always/frequently utilised freehand paper sketching. This was also confirmed by another recent study of the same authors in 2020, which showed that students believed that traditional drawing using pen and paper was a more efficient and effective approach to communicating early thoughts, particularly during the concept creation phase when they were expected to generate a significant number of ideas[13]. Reasonably, sketching using graphics software with a mouse increased from 6% to 15% in the concept finalizing phase as digital methods are more effective to support visual representation in the later phases.…”

‘Stream and Learn’: An Experiment to Reconnect Design Students with Theoretical Contents during the Pandemic

“…Otherwise, practical‐based units would usually be preferred. As design students often struggle with replicating studio experiences in a digital environment (Aldoy & Evans 2021 ), a similar pattern can be observed in turning theoretical contents appealing in a digital environment for practising students.…”

“…Therefore, it is crucial now more than ever to find new ways to reach online students and keep them motivated (Ahmad et al 2020). As digital practice allows much more flexibility in terms of iterations, it also offers positive inducements for both academics and students in the design education setting (Aldoy & Evans 2021), as the integration of new technologies has provided many upgrades in design education. Learning methods such as gamification and tools like cloud servers have been used to implement more interaction on e-learning and blended learning frameworks (Moreno-Ger et al 2008;Green 2016).…”

Creation of a Framework of Design Tool Characteristics to Support Evaluation and Selection of Visualisation Tools

“…Immediacy: The delay between the creative inspiration and digital representation has been noted by some researchers (Aldoy, 2011;Evans and Aldoy, 2016). The characteristic identified is termed as Immediacy in this study, and it refers to the fluidity/continuity of doing-displaying process when designers are using the design tools.…”