In both business training and higher professional education there is a clear shift towards competencybased learning to cope with fast technological and societal changes. Competencies can be construed as abilities that enable learners to recognize and define new problems in their domain of study and future work as well as solve these problems (Kirschner, van Vilsteren, Hummel, & Wigman, 1997). A...

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in two industrial design departments and two design companies, we explore the role of spatial arrangements for supporting creative design practices within different design studios. From our results, we show that designers explicitly make use of the physical space for 1) communicating and inspiring design ideas, 2) exploring design solutions and 3) ma...

North American consumption patterns lead to extensive natural resources and energy consumption, affecting in return the environment and quality of life. Rethinking of our current consumption of products through the products themselves, could lead to more sustainable life styles and relief pressure on our environment. This research aims at understanding why there are so few environmentally consc...

This article explores the development of an aesthetics framework that aims to provide designers with parameters to understand emotion, taste, and aesthetic judgment under their own cultural influence. This framework will equip designers with tangible criteria for judging cultural influences that have an impact on industrial design while preventing designers from adopting subjective options or b...

Recent advances in information, operations and networking technologies have brought forth many economical and organisational opportunities for industrial enterprises. One of the enabling pillars for the exploitation of these opportunities hinges predominantly on the design and introduction of frictionless vertical integration in enterprises. The paper presented concerns itself with the generati...

Passive solar design is an economical way of using solar energy in buildings. The thermal behavior of the buildings within its environment over a period of time can easily be predicted using accurate and simple analytical tools. This provides designers the information necessary to satisfy the occupant’s needs, reduce peak cooling/heating power demands, reduce the size of air conditioning/heatin...

Transgenic plants that express foreign proteins with industrial or pharmaceutical value represent an economical alternative to fermentation-based production systems. Specific vaccines have been produced in plants as a result of the transient or stable expression of foreign genes. It has recently been shown that genes encoding antigens of bacterial and viral pathogens can be expressed in plants ...

Collaborative design is a collection of the co-operated efforts undertaken by a team of designers. Due to multi-actors interaction, conflicts can emerge from disagreements between designers about proposed designs. Therefore, a critical element of collaborative design would be conflict resolution. In this paper, the DEPNET methodology is introduced to support conflict management. This methodolog...

The evaluation of the ability of modern industrial products to meet Environmental Sustainability requirements as efficiently and appropriately as possible has become one of the key-factors in the design and development activities. In the present study several design methods to support designers in order to solve such remarkable problems during the product development have been considered and an...