Framing design students, re-framing design education

Industrial Design Engineering is an inherently complex discipline, bringing together a variety of knowledge and skills. To aid the students of our new bachelor programme in navigating the complexity of their future discipline we created a first module that ‘frames the students as future Industrial Design Engineers with both the language of engineering (=mathematics) and the language of design (=visual)’. Because our programme at the University of Twente is rooted and located in a faculty of Engineering Technology and at the same time benefitting from the influx of knowledge from the faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences and our sister faculty of Electronic Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, the bachelor comprises of gamma- and beta topics, envisioned by the former marketing slogan of our university “High Tech - Human Touch”. In this context we developed an integrated full time module of fifteen European Credits. Keeping in mind that this first encounter of the freshmen would set the standard for the rest of their studies we set our selves the task to develop an agile module that offers the scope of topics and integrates them directly in short design sprints. Inspired by the frame-creation method by Dorst we decided to adopt a strong frame for the new module. In line with the slogan of our university and the applied character of engineering we settled for ‘making technology available for people’. We argue that for the students to be successful in this task, they should become ‘bilingual’.