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A Review of Digital Industrial and Product Design Methods in UK Higher Education

This paper identifies a key output from a research project that explored the potential for industrial designers to undertake practice using only digital methods (e.g. no pens/paper/hand-made models). The aim of the research was to more fully understand the design representations used in undergraduate industrial design education and the identification of opportunities for curriculum development, with a focus on the scope for a completely digital undergraduate curriculum. Data was collected from industrial design students from 22 UK universities and from 10 experienced practitioners in the USA. This paper was internationally blind peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers and published in a leading academic design journal. Follow-on work was undertaken in collaboration with Professor David Cheshire at Staffordshire University with funding from RC-UK Vitae. This applied the totally digital approach to industrial design practice and resulted in the design of two contrasting consumer products that explored alternative stylistic directions to identify limitations in modelling capabilities of the different digital tools.