Introducing Systems Engineering to Industrial Design Engineering Students with Hands-On Experience

Abstract

The article will present an innovative educational project to introduce Systems Engineering to third year's students in industrial design engineering at the University of Twente.In a short period the students are confronted with new technology, namely sensors and actuators. They have to apply this technology in a complex situation, the design of a home climate system or an intelligent automobile. They work in large groups without tutor. In parallel a basic course on systems engineering is given to provide the students with tools for handling this situation. The aim is that students are forced to apply the systems engineering tools in a concrete situation, thus directly experiencing the benefits. The project is implemented and the article describes the context, the goals, the setup, and the experiences of both teachers and students. The article concludes with an evaluation of the first and second year it has been executed 1: IntroductionSystems engineering is considered to be an important discipline for now and in the future as the products that will be created are increasingly more complex and have to be created in ever shorter development times [2,13]. Therefore engineers should at least be aware of the potential of systems engineering to handle these situations. Even more so for students in programs that deal with a broad spectrum of disciplines like industrial design engineering. However, it is generally believed that becoming an experienced systems engineer requires several years of working in the specific environment [8].To introduce Systems Engineering, the third year's students do a project that gives them the opportunity to practice some of the systems engineering tools in a complex situation. This article will describe the setup of the project in Section 4, after having explained the curriculum in Section 2 and the relevance of systems engineering to the industrial designer in Section 3. The results and an evalution are given in Sections 5 and 6, respectively. 2: Industrial Design Engineering at the University of Twente Third Theoretical Courses SASProject Bachelor assignmentYear Minor large portion of technology in order to educate "De Twentse Ontwerper" (designer from Twente) with the slogan "Create the Future" in mind, see [3]. To achieve that, the curriculum consists of courses in drawing and designing, ergonomics, technology, philosophy and social sciences. Both the curriculum and the project centered approach to education are treated in short.Following the Bologna-agreement, the technical curricula at the University of Twente adopt a three-year Bachelor of Science, and a two-year Master of Science program. The first year of the Bachelor program (see Table 1 and [3,6]) is an introduction that deals with nearly all areas of the industrial design field. In the following two years each area is treated more in depth. Each part of the curriculum has a certain theme like designing a consumer product, design of smart products, or design for a specific target group.The department of Engineering T...

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