Engineering design education in time-sensitive environments
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Jarrar, Majed; Anis, Hanan
Series: ICED
Institution: University of Ottawa, Canada
Section: Design Education
Page(s): 295-302
ISBN: 978-1-904670-97-1
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
The engineering design education has been undergoing reform for more than half a century. It was marginalized in the second half of the twentieth century mostly due to the proliferation of sciences and mathematics in engineering programs. Then, engineering design was restored through capstone projects as well as freshmen-level design required courses, after the outcome-based accreditation emerged. Due to the limited time of these design courses, students often end up rushing towards demonstrating a working prototype before the end of the course, and because of that, end up missing several important elements in process of prototyping. There is a new trend to build a 'design spine' throughout the engineering program as means of reform. We’d like to explore the impact of entrepreneurship on engineering design education because of its efficiency in solving time-sensitive problems through means such as rapid prototyping, lean startup, and customer discovery iteration. We used the course Technology Entrepreneurship at the University of Ottawa to test the design skills of the students who took it. We demonstrate positive results and discuss the possible contributing factors.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Design education, Design methodology, Design methods, Lean design