Developing engineering design core competences through analysis of industrial products

Most product development work carried out in industrial practice is characterised by being incremental, i.e. the industrial company has had a product in production and on the market for some time, and now time has come to design a new and upgraded variant. This type of redesign project requires that the engineering designers have core design competences to carry through an analysis of the existing product encompassing both a user-oriented side and a technical side, as well as to synthesise solution proposals for the new and upgraded product.

The authors of this paper see an educational challenge in staging a course module, in which students develop knowledge, understanding and skills, which will prepare them for being able to participate in and contribute to redesign projects in industrial practice. In the course module Product Analysis and Redesign that has run for 8 years we have developed and refined a product analysis method and a staging of it, which seems to be very productive.

Product Analysis and Redesign is a first year course module of the bachelor education Design & Innovation at the Technical University of Denmark. In this paper we will present our product analysis method and we will reflect on the empirical material from the students’ application of the method as a means to verify it.

We will discuss the product analysis method and the course module in relation to the CDIO-approach, and we conclude that the product analysis method is an important contribution to the conceive stage, is relevant for many engineering disciplines, and can be applied in engineering education from first year.