A Radically Assembled Design-Engineering Education Program with a Selection and Combination of Multiple Disciplines

Abstract

A radically assembled design-engineering program in the school of Design and Human Engineering (DHE) at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), newly founded in 2009, is presented. The most distinctive feature in DHE is that all students are required to select two disciplines for their major among three major disciplines, which are; (i) Integrated Industrial Design, (ii) Affective and Human Factors Engineering, and (iii) Engineering and Systems Design. The DHE's major system of the new design-engineering program was developed to foster the next generation designers and engineers, having talent in not only creative ideation but also systematic realization. In this paper, we first describe the founding background, educational rationale and curriculum structure. The curriculum includes students' selective curriculum paths based on their talent and aptitude; collaborative education structure as well as multidisciplinary team-based project courses taught by groups of instructors from different disciplines. Then, the new design-engineering education program is assessed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The first step of the research is to assess the students' core competencies required in design-engineering combined program by using K-CESA (Korea Colligate Essential Skill Assessment) with 32 students enrolled in DHE. A phenomenological study is also conducted to understand the problems in the current program via in-depth interviews with representative students in DHE. Also, a creative trans-disciplinary short course for students from other universities with various majors (e. g., engineering and design) was offered and tested to evaluate the combined educational system. Finally, we propose the direction for curriculum improvement and follow-up assessment plans, including assessments for students and faculty.