Nurturing All-round Engineering and Product Designers

This paper discusses how a curriculum should be revised to nurture all-round engineering and product designers to meet new social and industrial needs. It first reviews the limitations of the current engineering and product design education, and argues that it is biased either towards the acquisition of engineering and technological knowledge and skills but not critical thinking skills; or towards the nurturing of so-called creative thinking, while ignoring the conducting of in-depth investigations. This paper uses Hong Kong as a case study to further identify new social and industrial needs. To meet these needs, it proposes the consideration of `Eight Cs' for the engineering and product design curriculum, that is: Competent, Comprehensive, Compulsory, Critical, Creative, Curious, Collaborative, and Continuous. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.