Innovating industrial design curriculum in a knowledge-based, participatory and digital era

This article discusses three years’ research (2012-2014) on design education towards a 2016 undergraduate industrial design curriculum launch. It contributes a pathway for conservative courses towards design culture transformation and filling gaps between them and leading breakthrough education exemplars. The course proposes a collective knowledge creation model through social constructivism and constructionism that recognises its place in time and history and allows customisation to individual upbringing. It catches up with a profession transformed beyond a digital Bauhaus manifesto that joined and revaluated physical and digital artefacts as per their environment, quality of experiences, intelligence, networks and relations. Data and findings supported pedagogy redefinition from master-apprentice and teacher-centred skill transmission models to heutagogy and paragogy. The new approach required habitus change from a traditional goods-centred discipline to human-centred focus, critical design and making, design heuristics, CDIO (conceiving, designing, implementing, operating) and STEAM (science, technology, arts, mathematics) frameworks. Participants empathetically contextualised, problem framed and solved by crossing boundaries between disciplines, institutions, industries, students’ background and society. Research and practice promoted new forms of industrial design creation happening in physical and digital coexisting spaces of being. Course units evolved around an e-curriculum component working as a digital spine. Curriculum progressed from standard top-down transmission to sociotechnical and organisational networking, industry collaboration, international design studio and Design Factory model-like projects. In doing so, it became a foundation for future physical-digital industrial design artefacts, human computer interaction, machine learning, hacker culture systems, shared information, free open-source software and hardware development within a 4.0 industrial revolution.