Education guide 'Eindhoven designs' - Technische Universiteit ...

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are in collaboration with an external client.
By working together, sharing our expertise
and learning from each other, we can raise
the overall level of quality, become an even
stronger community and, most importantly,
design for innovative intelligent systems,
products and services.
Last year we started working with 12 themes,
of which two also physically integrate students
and staff, education studios and research labs.
They are becoming a living lab. Although this
is a challenge due to the different backgrounds
of our employees, which sometimes makes
it sometimes hard to speak each other’s
language, the size of the themes (up to 10
staff members and 50 students), the close
cooperation on projects and the integration
of research and education, appears to have
a positive influence on communication and
extending the overall knowledge, although we
have not yet had the time to fully evaluate the
impact of using themes.
The introduction of themes has put us one step
closer towards a network organisation with
more responsibility for employees. Instead of
a hierarchy with rules and control, the network
organisation is based on flexible self-managing
teams that share knowledge and expertise,
and collectively come to decisions within the
overall framework of the department. This type
of organisation especially aims at supporting
self-directed and long-life learning, stimulates
creativity and innovation, and thus fits in
perfectly with competency-centred learning
and taking responsibility for one’s own
(individual & departmental) development.
Within this network organisation, employees
simultaneously have different roles within
education, for example being a coach,
assignor/lecturer, assessor, coordinator,
theme champ, member of a theme and expert,
next to the roles they have within research.
In the remaining part of this book, we will elucidate the focus of our department.
In chapter two we will explain in depth why and how to design for social/
societal transformation. Chapter three addresses the theoretical bases for
competency-centred learning. Chapter four to seven explain the implications of
this theory for the Department of Industrial Design, which is consolidated in the
ID Competence Framework. Chapter four introduces the framework and explains
the different competency areas and chapter five addresses the design process
and the importance of reflection within the framework. Chapter six discusses
the development of the overall competence of designing during the study and
shows the developmental stages of growth as a designer. Chapter seven explains
how this theoretical framework is put into practice through the different learning
activities. Finally, chapter eight shows the mechanism of learning through feedback
and our assessment procedure, which includes the showcase: the student’s tool
to demonstrate and communicate development of the overall competence of
designing, and their growth as a designer.