EXPLOITING HAND SKETCHING IN EDUCATING ‘MECHANICALLY ORIENTED’ ENGINEERING STUDENTS
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Ion, B.
Author: Farrugia, Philip; Borg, Jonathan; Camilleri, Kenneth
Series: ICED
Section: Design Education
Page(s): 45-54
Abstract
In our years of experience in training mechanical engineering students we found a strong tendency that due to the overall knowledge transfer they receive, these future engineers tend to be oriented in mainly thinking and presenting details of their design solution. Whilst clearly design solutions need to be eventually described in detail for their successful realization, our experience also shows that many times, good detailed design solutions do not make up for poor solution concepts generated. In this paper, we therefore present the overall pedagogic approach adopted at the University of Malta in exploiting sketching both for expressing working principle solutions and also for early form design. In addition, this paper will outline how a prescribed sketching language was developed to enable co-located designers to quickly express and exchange 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models of their solution sketches, all this helping in making 'global design' truly feasible even at the early design stages.
Keywords: SKETCHING LANGUAGES; PEDAGOGIC APPROACH; GLOBAL DESIGN; DESIGN SYNTHESIS