Developing Industrial Design Education: A British perspective

After establishing the context of design and design education in the UK, the authors describe emerging themes in industrial-design education. These themes can be classified into three types. The first theme involves enabling students to utilize a variety of research approaches at different levels. The design process has always involved elements of researching, but the evidence based design approach requires a new designer-friendly research tool kit to be assembled. The new tools now available include ways of eliciting user needs by focus groups and user observation techniques. We also examine how these research (with a small r) approaches relate to necessary developments in Design Research (with a big R).