‘One Thing Better’ And ‘Redesigning Design Education’- A Collaboration Between Industry And Academia.

The Design industries are in positive flux and academia is trying to follow the pace as best it can; however some of the structures within academic frameworks restrict flexibility to mimic an industrial scenario. This disconnect can be compounded by educational alignment issues where different academic levels i.e. school to university can have large gaps between academic, industry and student expectations. This paper frames the collaboration, design and explorative stages between the authors, through prototyping a new final year module called Service and System Design. The research project intends to start with some tangible experiences for the authors and students alike and ultimately is anticipated to have wider impact within the author’s institution and beyond. For the first of the two theme based projects, the students are tasked to focus on designing ‘One thing better’ in the context of the module. This project is intended to generate evidence for the industry partner to understand the level of students’ abilities so that the support mechanisms can be tailored for an improved outcome on the second larger project, ‘Redesigning Design Education’. This project takes a deeper dive approach with the intention of students following the project theme and reflecting on their own ‘design learning’ experiences, using those as a catalyst guided by both industry and academic. The research evidenced in this paper has been carried out with a pre –process focus, with the intention of provoking dialogue within the design disciplines academic and industrial communities so that further developments can be integrated into multi-disciplinary projects as the next stage of the research activity.