Bringing together industrial design and engineering design education

Practical experience shows that the cooperation of engineering design and industrial design within product development is strongly required for developing innovative products. However, their cooperation is often insufficient and characterized by misunderstandings. Bringing together both disciplines already during education is accepted to be of importance to solve this problem, but temporarily realized only partly at German university programs. Realized through institutes of both sides a new course on industrial design engineering has recently been set up at TU Munich to focus this white field within German university education. Within this course the different discipline specific approaches and methodologies are taught to students of both disciplines in a theory block before the students get the chance to apply this interdisciplinary method mix within common team development projects in a practical part. The concrete organisation of the course as well as experiences made within its first cycle will be presented in this paper. Upon this a resume will be given that summarizes the findings as well as the derived optimizations for the next round.