A Design-Engineering Interdisciplinary and German-Korean Intercultural Design Project Course

Abstract

The paper presents a project-based design course that provides students, majoring in Industrial Design or Engineering Design and residing in Korea or Germany, with opportunities to learn how to effectively collaborate in an interdisciplinary and intercultural team. This course was developed in order to address the ever-increasing needs for designers and engineers to be equipped with such capability in collaborative product development. Based on the observations made during the design projects, many issues have been found. Important issues include conflicts due to different value priorities and different design processes between design and engineering students, and different ways of thinking between Korean and German students. The paper also illustrates how these issues are resolved or alleviated in this course. In conclusion, several suggestions are made for successful education for interdisciplinary and intercultural design collaboration, which are hoped to be beneficial to those planning similar courses.