Comparative analysis of recruitment qualifications of industrial designers in Turkey through undergraduate education programs and online recruitment resources

Although the term “industrial designer” is a well known title, the understanding of industrial design as a profession is still unclear, as evidenced by its application in the sector. In light of this, schools of industrial design should, despite the immense contributions to the sector made by their past graduates, continuously revise their curricula and review their deficiencies to provide a better correlation between their graduates and the needs of the industry. The aim of this study is to ascertain the role of the industrial designer from the perspective of industry by analyzing the specifications stated in job adverts for the recruitment of industrial designers. This study was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, an in-depth literature review was completed. The second phase was dedicated to the identification of the industrial designer in terms of education institutions, and to realize this, the curricula and course contents of industrial design undergraduate programs selected from ten universities in Turkey were analyzed. The third phase was directed towards identifying the profile of the industrial designer from the perspective of industry. Thus, the analyses were made through an investigation of the job opportunities available in the industrial design profession announced in seven major job search websites during the last 4 months of 2009. The results of this study are crucial for all parties involved as they help to satisfy the recruitment expectations of industrial design education, the industry, and the graduates.     

Exploring the learning problems and resource usage of undergraduate industrial design students in design studio courses

Design is a powerful weapon for modern companies so it is important to have excellent designers in the industry. The purpose of this study is to explore the learning problems and the resources that students use to overcome problems in undergraduate industrial design studio courses. A survey with open-type questions was conducted to collect data. Participants in this study were 189 undergraduate industrial design students from three universities, and two coding schema were formulated for analysing the data. The results demonstrated that the most difficult design tasks included concept generation, design presentation, and design research. The learning resources used to solve the learning problems included four categories: people, object, method, and environment. This information will increase the understanding of the learning process of students and provide a reference for teaching and the setting of learning resources in industrial design education.     

Interdisciplinarity in design education: understanding the undergraduate student experience

Interdisciplinarity is becoming a critical issue of concern for design schools across East Asia in their attempts to provide industry graduates with the skills and competences to make creative contributions in a global economy. As a result, East Asian higher education institutions are aggressively endeavouring to provide interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that combine traditional designerly skills with engineering knowledge and methods. The current study takes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course as case-study to examine how the pedagogic strategy of team teaching influences student learning experience. Two surveys of student learning were conducted for this research purpose. The first provided an indication of the holistic student learning experience, while the second explored the conditions of team and non-team teaching as influence upon learning experiences specifically. Results showed how students taught by a single instructor provided a more positive overall opinion of course quality and experienced significantly more encouragement to participate compared to team taught respondents. However, findings also indicated how team teaching significantly increased the students’ experience of a balanced contribution from different disciplinary perspectives and how the team teaching approach was significantly more effective in providing students with greater opportunities to understand the relevance of the different disciplines to the course subject. We conclude with a discussion of results in terms of the effective use of team teaching at undergraduate level as strategy for interdisciplinary learning experiences.     

Telecommunications and education in the USA

The author examines the use of technology and telecommunications in various subsectors of education. Included in the examination are metropolitan communications networks for education, costs and economies of scale, and the federal role in technological innovation in education. He concludes with recommendations for additional studies aimed at achieving increased social benefits from the use of technology in education within metropolitan areas.     

中、美、日制造业发展比较研究

与美、日比较，中国制造业无论是产品。人均占有水平还是技术发展、技术装备制造、经济效益、整体实力都存在着根本差距。通过中、美、日制造业发展的比较研究，对借鉴先行国家制造业的发展经验，加快实现中国工业化具有重要意义。     

Time pressure and creativity in industrial design

Creativity is a critical aspect of competitiveness in all trades and professions. In the case of designers, creativity is of the utmost importance. Based on the perspective of industrial design, the relationship between creativity and time pressure was investigated in this study using control and experimental groups. In the first part of the study, fuzzy theory, the Creative Product Analysis Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, and Consensus Assessment Techniques were integrated to establish a method to evaluate creativity in industrial design. Moreover, the experimental and control groups were compared using three tests: the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the product concept development test, and the product aesthetic development test. Six hypotheses were examined. Based on an analysis of the results, suggestions are offered to improve creativity management. The suggestions can serve as reference for creativity management of individuals, groups and companies in order to make the concept generating process more efficient.     

Learning to think spatially in an undergraduate interdisciplinary computational design context: a case study

Spatial thinking skills are vital for success in everyday living and work, not to mention the centrality of spatial reasoning in scientific discoveries, design-based disciplines, medicine, geosciences and mathematics to name a few. This case study describes a course in spatial thinking and communicating designed and delivered by an interdisciplinary team over a three-year period to first-year university students. Four major elements provide a framework for the sequencing of instruction and acquisition of 2D and 3D spatial thinking and reasoning skills in a computational design context. We describe the process of introducing students to computational design environments beginning with a fun and familiar tool in preparation for a more complex, industry-standard system (SolidWorks). A design project provides diverse student teams an opportunity to integrate and apply foundational spatial concepts and skills including sketching, 2D and 3D representations, as well as digital and physical modeling. Samples of student work illustrate the scaffolding necessary for students to successfully draw upon the spatial thinking and communication skills required to complete their team projects beginning with applying sketching techniques; modeling individual 3D parts; creating digital assemblies; and finally building the equivalent 3D physical model. Key instructional principles provide a framework for the analysis of what worked and what didn’t in relation to spatial skills development in students. The lessons learned are identified along with potential future directions for teaching and learning scholarship in spatial thinking development within a computational design context.     

The neglect of industrial design

This paper aims at helping innovators to rethink their overall approach to industrial design in product innovation. It examines the role of industrial design in product innovation and demonstrates with both normative and empirical evidence that industrial design is still neglected in British manufacturing industry. The research reveals that firms satisfied their industrial design needs through engineering designers in preference to professional industrial designers. It is concluded that to make the most of design and create market-winning products, the synthesising, interfacing and 'integratorial' approach of an industrial designer is of paramount importance; engineering design, while both necessary and crucial, is by itself insufficient to ensure that innovative products satisfy physical form as well as functional requirements of customers/users. The paper warns that the continued inattention to industrial design may place UK firms at a competitive disadvantage in international markets.     

Purposes and analysis of industrial package design

A simplified analysis is presented of the physsical phenomena and mechanical stresses involved in schock and vibration hazards which lead to concealed damages. The role of industrial packaging design in reducing the destructive mechanical stresses to harmless levels is discussed. Consideration is also given to the factors to which contribute to an optimal package design based on a compromise between the cost of occasional concealed damage and the cost of extra protection achieved by the liberal use of expensive packaging designs.     

Spanning transnational boundaries in industrial markets: A study of Israeli entrepreneurs in China

This study investigates Israeli transnational entrepreneurs who provide B2B intermediation services in China. To understand the dynamic evolution of their profile and activity, we apply an interpretative framework that combines practice theory and boundary spanning models to analyze six case studies of Israeli transnational entrepreneurs in China. The findings indicate a gradual evolution of their personal and professional profile, determined by a dynamic interdependence between various forms of capital, entrepreneurial habitus, and circumstantial factors. They mobilize a combination of social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital to span organizational, country, cultural and stage boundaries between Israeli and Chinese individuals and organizations. We integrate these findings into a comprehensive model, presenting the various components and stages that led to the development of transnational profiles and activities. Our findings provide an original contribution both to industrial marketing theory and practice, and to transnational entrepreneurship literature, advancing academic understanding and offering a clear roadmap for entrepreneurs, organizations and policy-makers.     

Comparative industrial advertising: The content and frequency

Comparative advertising is the pratice of comparing two or more named or unnamed products in an advertisement. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of comparative advertising in widely circulated industrial publications. The study examined approximately 2100 full-page advertisements in major trade publications for the years 1970, 1975, and 1980. It was found that comparative advertising is not the dominant format for industrial journal advertising. Further, there was a significant decrease in the use of comparative advertising from 1975 to 1980. Nevertheless, when industrial advertisers use comparative advertising, they tend to rely more frequently on implied comparisons rather than on the more aggressive, strictly comparative format. Also, industrial marketers seem to be more inclined to stress product features rather than price, distribution, or promotion when using comparative advertising.     

浅谈我国石油石化产业组织改革

改革开放以来,我国石油石化产业组织按照市场化渐进式改革道路,产权体制从行政集中管理体制向国有石油公司、股份制石油公司转变,从产业链的上下游分割向上下游一体化的石油公司转变。通过改革,促进了产业综合实力的提升,建立了市场化条件下的竞争机制。我国的石油石化产业仍需继续深化改革,创新体制和机制,进一步建立健全现代企业制度,做强做大石油石化企业,建设具有国际竞争力的跨国企业。同时,应注重改革与稳定发展的关系,兼顾公平与效率。     

Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological design education

The importance of creativity in technological design education is now clearly recognized, both in everyday understanding and also in formal curriculum guidelines. Design offers special opportunities for creativity because of the “openness” of problems (ill-defined problems, the existence of a variety of pathways to the solution, the absence of pre-specified “correct” solutions). However, teachers are still confronted by the question of how to specify which designs are creative and why, how to identify where the creative strengths of designs lie so that students can build on these, and what advice to give on how to change designs to make them more creative. There are also still open questions concerning design pedagogy. A “functional” model of creativity offers guidelines for making plain to students what they are expected to achieve with their designs and for diagnosing the creativity of the designs they offer. These yield, in turn, guidelines for design pedagogy.     

Reflection and professional identity development in design education

Design thinking positions designers as the drivers of the design space yet academic discourse is largely silent on the topic of professional identity development in design. Professional identity, or the dynamic narratives that individuals construct and maintain to integrate their personal qualities with professional responsibilities, has not been widely addressed in design education either. The study investigated the use of reflective writing in an introductory design course to help students explore and interpret their design beliefs, experiences, and self-awareness in support of professional identity development work. The results indicate that authorial presence, analysis, and narrative quality are common qualities in reflective responses, but emotion is notably lacking from student writing. Students were highly reflective in relation to a general experience with uncertainty and were least reflective when discussing ideation processes. Implications for design education and related research are analysed and discussed.     

Motivation for creativity in architectural design and engineering design students: implications for design education

The investigation reported here dealt with the study of motivation for creativity. The goals were to assess motivation for creativity in architectural design and engineering design students based on the Cognitive Orientation theory which defines motivation as a function of a set of belief types, themes, and groupings identified as relevant for the development of creativity. Differences between the two groups of students were expected in some of the scores of the belief types, themes, and groupings. Participants were 112 students (52 from architecture, and 60 from engineering) who were administered the questionnaire of the Cognitive Orientation of Creativity. Significant differences in numerous motivational contents were observed between the groups of students. Major characteristics of the architectural design students were an emphasis on the inner world, inner-directedness, and a development of the self, and of the engineering design students being receptive to the environment, and demanding from oneself despite potential difficulties. The findings provide insights for intervention programs targeted at improving architectural and engineering design education.     

Applying quality function deployment in industrial design curriculum planning

Industrial design is a discipline that combines multiple professional fields. Enterprise demands for industrial design competencies also change over time; thus, the curriculum of industrial design education should be compatible with the current demands of the industry. However, scientific approaches have not been previously employed to plan industrial design curriculums. Therefore, a gap exists between the expectations of enterprises and the professional competencies of numerous graduates in the industrial design discipline. To solve this problem, we first identified the professional competencies required of industrial design professionals in industry and academia, and then ranked these competencies based on their degree of importance using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Subsequently, we planned an industrial design curriculum that meets practical workplace needs by applying quality function deployment (QFD), and proposed items that require special attention for the industrial design curriculum. The results of this study are as follows (1) we obtained a ranking of various items of the professional competencies in industrial design based on their degree of importance to determine which professional competencies should be specifically cultivated; (2) we planned an industrial design curriculum that addresses the needs of enterprises according to industrial design ability index (IDAI); and (3) we recommend the courses and subjects that should be emphasized and enhanced in the existing industrial design curriculum.     

PLM education in production design and engineering by e-Learning

These days more attention is being paid to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) using a technique for managing total product planning, design, manufacturing, sales, and disposal. We researched business processes and education curriculum of the PLM system in manufacturing businesses. We designed the curriculum of PLM education and developed part of a lesson. Most importantly, e-Learning is shown to be an effective tool for achieving educational objectives. We found that not only knowledge and theory but also practical education methods using case studies in an e-Learning environment are necessary for human resources to develop effective PLM.     

Architectural design education: in varietate unitas

A fascinating and rich landscape of personal views and approaches can be seen in architectural design and in architectural design education. This variation may be confusing for students. This paper focuses on the question: is the framework of generic elements that we developed for explicating the design process helpful to compare the differences in architectural design approaches? The results of interviewing a variety of 15 architectural, urban and landscape designers show all kinds of personal approaches that have a set of five underlying generic elements in common. Therefore, the framework may be helpful for teachers and students to describe these personal approaches and may help students in understanding differences and similarities and in finding out what their own personal approach may be.     

美对中国产玩具马实施召回

美国消费品安全委员会与Toy Investments公司联合宣布对中国产Floppy Friends玩具马实施自愿性召回。此次被召回的玩具马底部为可改变高度的基座,当基座增高时,玩具马呈俯卧姿势;当基座降低时,玩具马就会站立。此次被召回的商品数量约为300件。召回原因为,该玩具表面的涂料铅含量超标,违反了联邦含铅涂料标准。