Towards integrated industrial design education

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Abstract Comprehensive design education is an inevitable trend that adapts to the trend of design development. The direction of reform in design education should be from curriculum-centered to subject-centered, and industrial design as a highly integrated cross-discipline to organize teaching. , comprehensively improve the overall quality of the designer.
Keywords: comprehensive design education

In the past 20 years, with the rapid development of social economy, politics, and culture, the connotation, object, and methodology of industrial design have undergone tremendous changes, placing higher demands on the professional qualities of designers. In order to adapt to this situation, design education circles all over the world are actively exploring new ways and new directions for designing reforms. As a developing country, China's industrial design is still a new and urgent subject to be developed. Although the scale of China's industrial design education can be called the first in the world, the system of industrial design education is still incomplete. How to adapt our talent training to changing market demands and to integrate them with the international advanced level as soon as possible so as to meet the opportunities and challenges brought by the entry into WTO is a major issue facing the design education community in China.

At the turn of the century, many domestic design institutes undertook major reforms in teaching thinking, teaching management, teaching methods, and curriculum setting, and proposed a new industrial design teaching model. In these teaching reforms, there is a consensus that industrial design must be organized as a highly integrated interdisciplinary discipline to enhance the overall quality of designers. Towards synthesis is both a major trend in the development of industrial design and a development direction that design education must follow.

I. Integration is a major trend in the development of industrial design

The history of the development of human design has experienced three stages from synthesis to differentiation and reintegration. In the artisan design stage, designers often design, produce and even sell trinity, and they have a broad knowledge background. As a result, many design masters have emerged. The division of labor after the industrial revolution has made the designer a relatively independent profession and entered the 20th century. In the era, with the rapid development of science and technology, design has once again become a highly comprehensive discipline. As pointed out by Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of the frog design company, the 1950s were the production age, the 60s were the research and development era, the 1970s were the marketing years, and the 1980s were the financial years. The 1990s is an integrated era.

The comprehensive trend of industrial design is comprehensive. First, the connotation of industrial design determines its own comprehensiveness. Industrial design involves a wide range of subject areas, both social, cultural, and technological. A good designer must have a keen insight into the development trend of the society, have a considerable knowledge and understanding of the cultural background of design, and must also grasp the development trend of new technologies. Due to the rapid development of computer technology, the integration of CAID-CAE-CAM's technology platform further promotes the integration of design technologies and makes the industrial design itself increasingly high-tech.

Second, the industrial design discipline has become more extensive. With the transition from an industrialized society characterized by mechanization to a “post-industrial society” characterized by informationization, the scope of industrial design has greatly expanded. Industrial enterprises have expanded to all walks of life, from product design and other hardware design to enterprise planning and other software design. In particular, the rapid development of the Internet has made new media design and interface design a new area of ​​industrial design.

Thirdly, the rise of design management requires that designers need to understand the entire process of design development more comprehensively. They must have skills and knowledge backgrounds for communication and collaboration with experts in various fields, master the basic principles and methods of enterprise management, and make the design possible. Enterprises play a more important and more comprehensive role.

Fourth, trends such as green design, sustainable development, and economic globalization have put forward more extensive requirements on the quality and knowledge structure of industrial designers.

It is the realization that in today's diverse environment, it is not possible to meet the needs of society with just one specific field of expertise. Many design companies have adopted a comprehensive design strategy that integrates all design fields to meet the needs of contemporary society. Various issues provide design services for the society in all directions. Whether it is the Japanese GK design company or the German frog design company, they all emphasize that traditionally independent disciplines infiltrate each other to create the most comprehensive results. Today, providing a total solution instead of a single product is becoming the main goal of industrial design. This trend obviously has higher requirements for designers.

Second, the challenge of design education

Just as design development has undergone an integrated, differentiated and reintegrated process, design education has also undergone a similar process. Modern design education was born out of traditional art education and architectural education. The forerunner of modern design education is Bauhaus, but the traditional teaching method of arts and crafts is still very clear. He admires the masters to take apprenticeships and learn from them. The student (apprentice?) combines the knowledge learned in the workshop. With the modernization of the education system, there has been a tendency to separate the original organic linkage into mutually independent disciplines and courses, and it has become more and more detailed. In the 1950s, the entire Soviet Union was studied and a professional-based teaching system was established. The professional division was too detailed, and there was a lack of communication between professionals. This limited the development of students' overall quality to some extent. This was particularly true in engineering colleges. The industrial design education in many engineering colleges follows the so-called systematic education in engineering specialty teaching. In order to pursue the integrity of the knowledge structure, the comprehensive characteristics of the design discipline are neglected. The typical design education model is the so-called three-stage model, namely the modeling basis, design basis and professional design. In these three blocks, a number of self-contained courses have been divided. Although the curriculum will change with the development of the times, each lesson is still independent of each other. From the point of view of each course, the self-contained system certainly facilitates the integrity of the course. But this completeness is at the expense of the organic nature of the fragmented design discipline. If industrial design is an organic whole, then our teaching system will not only cut it into pieces, but also cut it into silk, and then rely on students to restore it to an organic whole, which is extremely difficult. A common phenomenon in the industrial design department is that some students are excellent in almost every class, but they can't do good design. This is the consequence of the lack of comprehensive design training. Today's design creativity must be based on a highly integrated knowledge and skill base.

Some engineering college design majors come from the arts and engineering majors respectively. The curriculum is usually based on the art + technology model, and some art and engineering courses are set up. Due to the lack of convergence between courses, teachers lacked exchanges, which led to a mechanical curriculum. As a result, art is still art, technology is still technology, and design discipline cannot be formed. In fact, without comprehensive design practice, it is impossible to cultivate excellent designers. In stressing the infiltration of literature and science and advocating quality education today, it is difficult to achieve the goal only by adding corresponding cross-curricular courses. It is necessary to start with a reform of the teaching system and structure to explore a more comprehensive education path. Design education challenges.

Third, to a comprehensive design education

To adapt to the comprehensive development trend of design and establish a comprehensive design education system, we should emphasize design as the center, that is, a series of well-designed “designed” topics as the core, and organically organize the corresponding supporting knowledge so that students can work on these topics. Develop comprehensive design and creativity in the learning process. The purpose of doing so is to reorganize the curriculum systems that were previously artificially separated into an organic, interconnected whole. What needs to be pointed out is that the series of design topics here is not a topic for design objects, but a topic for designing procedures and methodologies. It not only emphasizes the organic connections of related knowledge, but also emphasizes the continuity and completeness of the design process, especially in China. The practical aspects that students lack include market research and analysis, model making, engineering technology design, and marketing promotion. Such exploration has begun in China.

The new teaching plan of the Department of Industrial Design at the Fine Arts Institute of Tsinghua University puts forward the idea of ​​a “curriculum ring” that forms a number of basic courses for each semester after the second grade to form a curriculum cycle around a design topic. Each supporting system forms a supporting small system that focuses on solving one level of design issues. The curriculum ring spirals from junior to senior. Such a system attempts to integrate the previously self-contained curriculum organically in several relatively complete small systems to establish a design-centered large system. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design focuses on future designers to design an education and offers students “comprehensive learning” classes that combine knowledge from multiple design fields.

The teaching plan of the Department of Industrial Design of Hunan University in 2001 highlights the design main line that runs through the university for four years. The design topics are from shallow to deep. Each semester is designed primarily, basic design, design procedures and methods, product development and design, system design, and special topics. The competition design is the core, with the corresponding basic and professional courses, and an integrated design week is arranged at the end of each semester so that students can organically integrate their knowledge and capabilities in a timely manner.

The above reform of design teaching shows the trend of design education shifting from curriculum-centered to task-centered.
In addition to the reform of the teaching system and structure, integrated design education is more important than the overall improvement of the quality of teachers. Design-centered education with a focus on the subject means that teachers turn from one or two courses to overall responsibility for guiding design topics. Teachers with knowledge backgrounds obviously cannot meet the requirements of integrated design education. The teachers of industrial design should not only have corresponding professional qualities, but also have multidisciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary comprehensive and comprehension abilities. They can also understand and grasp the frontiers and trends of international academic development.

Just as industrial design itself is diversified and colorful, comprehensive design education should also be diversified. Some practices of foreign design universities may provide us with some references.

1. Tutor or studio system. This system originated from Western art teaching has a long history in our country's art major, but it is