Teaching Product Design Through Industry Collaboration

There has been increased interest in using problem-based pedagogies to enable design engineering undergraduates obtain a more relevant learning experience. Furthermore organizations, such as Engineers Ireland, are calling for graduate engineers to have more rounded skills in the areas of presentation, communication and team-work. However some scholars argue that design “is hard to learn and harder still to teach”. This paper provides an example of using student-industry collaboration in the teaching of product design to Mechanical Engineering final year students at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) based in Ireland. The work proposes to make an original contribution by directly interfacing with industry in order to simulate a real-life client-designer interaction for students. Finally we argue that this work contributes new insights to the debate on “pedagogies of engagement”.