How education background affects design outcome: teaching product development to mechanical engineers, industrial designers and managers

ABSTRACT

Product design and development (PDD) is a current topic of academic and industrial research. Emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as design thinking and creativity has been recently pulled together into the teaching and research on PDD. This paper looks into a multidisciplinary setting made up of three similar but independent PDD masters courses taught at three higher education institutions, having the same assessment, syllabus, assignments and outcomes. As expected, students’ projects foci are different. The outcomes of this experience were confronted with an ex-post literature review, which generated thorough guidelines that supported an innovative proposal for PDD education, to be implemented into an interdisciplinary Summer School. Significant generalisable contributions for educating modern engineers, designers and business entrepreneurs are expected, instead of just teaching methods of engineering, design and entrepreneurship at the case universities. The limitation of the used inductive reasoning concerns ‘truth’ being suggested but not assured.

KEYWORDS:

• Design output
• mechancial engineering
• industrial design
• operations management
• design teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Arlindo Silva has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and 25 years of teaching and research experience. His current research interests rest on engineering design, product development, creativity, materials selection methodologies, composite structures, cost modelling and management of uncertainty in design. He published over a hundred papers in journals, conferences and book chapters, more than 50 patents and 3 books in engineering-related topics. He received the MIT-Portugal Education Innovation Award in 2009 and was a Professor of Excellence at the University of Lisbon in 2009, 2013, 2014 and 2015, before joining the Singapore University of Technology and Design as an Associate Professor at the Engineering Product Development Pillar. He was also a Senior Materials Education consultant at Granta Design Ltd, Cambridge, UK and is an active member of PDMA, ASEE, ASME, INCOSE, DS and SPEE. He currently teaches Introduction to Design, and develops his research at the SUTD-MIT International Design Center, where he co-leads the Experimental Design Thrust.

Marco Leite is an invited lecturer of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Instituto Superior Técnico and lectures the course on New Product Development at ISCTE Business School – IBS, both in Lisbon, Portugal. He also lectures courses on new product development at the executive level at INDEG-ISCTE. He received his PhD in the Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing under the MIT-Portugal program. He currently leads the Lab2ProD, a laboratory for product development at IST. He authored several papers in the field of product development, additive manufacturing and materials selection. Marco’s research interests focus on methodologies for product development, namely with materials and process evaluation and selection, and on methodologies of design for additive manufacturing (DfAM).

Ricardo Simões is an Associate Professor with Tenure at the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave (IPCA), Barcelos, Portugal, and has a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of North Texas (USA). He is also a senior researcher at IPC – Institute for Polymers and Composites – of the University of Minho, Guimaraes, Portugal, and the Associate Laboratory I3N – Institute of Nanostructures, Nanomodelling and Nanofabrication. His areas of research include Engineering Design, particularly complex systems and multifunctional product development, Advanced Materials, including sustainability and circular economy, and Medical Devices, particularly focused on health/healthcare and assisted ambient living (AAL). He supervised 9 PhD and over 30 Masters theses in the scope of these research areas and coordinated a total of 20 National and International research projects funded by competitive programmes. He has over 50 Publications in Refereed Scientific Journals, 12 Book Chapters, over 70 Publications in International Conference Proceedings, 3 Publications in Technical Journals, 2 Edited Books and over 50 oral presentations in international conferences.

João Vilas-Boas is the director of an MSc in the Industrial Management scientific domain at ISCTE-IUL (Portugal) and an International member of the Scientific Committee of the PhD in Technological Innovation Engineering of the Università degli Studi di Palermo. He holds a PhD and MsC in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Cranfield University (UK). His current research interests are industrial ecology and sustainable operations, innovation and product development, project management success in temporary multi-organisations, servitisation, service systems, collaborative networks, virtual organisations, I4.0 and curricula development. He supervised 24 Msc and 1 PhD theses. João published 8 articles in international refereed scientific journals and 33 papers in international peer-reviewed conference proceedings. João is currently leading the ISCTE-IUL participation in a mobilising project to apply I4.0 to the ornamental stones.

ORCID

Arlindo Silva http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5120-3914

Marco Leite http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-4475

João Vilas-Boas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2265-8239

Ricardo Simões http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3097-8849

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by National Funds through FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, Reference UID/CTM/50025/2013 and FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 Programme under the project number POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007688. This work was supported by FCT, through IDMEC, under LAETA, project UID/EMS/50022/2013.