Knowledge management system for Universal Design training

Mature society of economy and welfare is any individual advocacy is generally accepted, along with movements for individualization. At this society, providing opportunities to learn techniques is important to support a person with disability for engineering students. In order to touch welfare situations for students, we have tackled development of an internship program with a special subsidiary company (SSC). The SSC employs not only many persons with disabilities but also experienced engineers, and has various universal design environments. We found that the student learned relations between major subjects at engineering and production techniques through the interview survey. In addition, we also considered that the program was related to Nonaka's knowledge management model. Reporting the internship experience meant Combination process in the model had a good influence on other students, other faculty members and the other SSCs. As a result, there were spread for students joined the SSC internship program and SSCs accepted the internship program. These considerations suggest that the internship program with a special subsidiary company is one possible way for growing universal design mind engineers.