Abstract
This study evaluates a new pedagogic approach implemented in material courses for product design students at bachelor level education. Material education within the field of design education at technical faculties has, in general, a strong technical focus, e.g. selecting materials with predominant focus on engineering properties of materials. Product design education at a bachelor level need to offer material courses that prepares the design students to work both on inspirational and analytical levels in material selection processes. Early in the design education, students often have a preconception of materials, and they need to be introduced to an open-minded inspirational material selection process, based on scientific design methods. When developing a new curriculum for the material courses, it is important to teach materials and production methods in a contextualized setting with emphasis on how materials can be approached in a design process. Methods can be seen as mental tools that aids the design students in navigating complexity and offers them a structure to deal with unfamiliar territories. After an evaluation, we selected some methods, guidelines and tools to integrate in the mandatory material courses for the product design students e.g. the Expressive-Sensorial Atlas, Meaning Driven Materials Selection and the Material Driven Design method. The implementation were made in two steps in order to test, evaluate and further develop a framework for teaching materials courses to product design students. This study only reports the first step of implementation since the second step is under development and will be implemented during autumn 2017.
Keywords
Material Driven Design; Material education; Product design; Material selection; Teaching practice
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2017.113
Citation
Asbjørn Sörensen, C., Japtap, S.,and Warell, A.(2017) A new approach to materials in Product Design education - A shift from technical properties towards sensorial characteristics, in Elvin Karana, Elisa Giaccardi, Nithikul Nimkulrat, Kristina Niedderer, Serena Camere (eds.), Alive. Active. Adaptive. International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials, 19-20 June 2017, Delft and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2017.113
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
A new approach to materials in Product Design education - A shift from technical properties towards sensorial characteristics
This study evaluates a new pedagogic approach implemented in material courses for product design students at bachelor level education. Material education within the field of design education at technical faculties has, in general, a strong technical focus, e.g. selecting materials with predominant focus on engineering properties of materials. Product design education at a bachelor level need to offer material courses that prepares the design students to work both on inspirational and analytical levels in material selection processes. Early in the design education, students often have a preconception of materials, and they need to be introduced to an open-minded inspirational material selection process, based on scientific design methods. When developing a new curriculum for the material courses, it is important to teach materials and production methods in a contextualized setting with emphasis on how materials can be approached in a design process. Methods can be seen as mental tools that aids the design students in navigating complexity and offers them a structure to deal with unfamiliar territories. After an evaluation, we selected some methods, guidelines and tools to integrate in the mandatory material courses for the product design students e.g. the Expressive-Sensorial Atlas, Meaning Driven Materials Selection and the Material Driven Design method. The implementation were made in two steps in order to test, evaluate and further develop a framework for teaching materials courses to product design students. This study only reports the first step of implementation since the second step is under development and will be implemented during autumn 2017.