Future sports equipment designers’ experience of ‘advanced’ design tools

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

 As technology advances, the demands placed upon product and sports equipment design graduates are ever changing. As well as being creatively-focused, they are expected to be technologically-astute multi-disciplinarians, able to take a lead role in coordinating a wide range of complex design tasks. In support of this, the design education landscape has had to evolve to keep learners abreast of developments in design process and technology, particularly in digital design and manufacture. Modern design is augmented by an array of powerful digital design and manufacturing tools. Many of these were once the remit of the specialist engineer or analyst, requiring a highly mathematical or codified approach, outside of the approachable Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) found within Computer Aided Design (CAD). Over time, developers have focused upon the accessibility and integration of such tools, bringing them into simple workspaces, and opening up `advanced' tools to designers from more diverse backgrounds. This study considers the experiences of final-year undergraduate designers experiencing such processes for the first time. The paper takes a quantitative approach to explore the capabilities of the cohort as well as some qualitative data from their feedback and assessment. The study seeks to explore if tools that have previously been reserved for ‘specialists’ can be applied successfully by undergraduate designers, as well as to explore any benefits of introducing such tools to the curriculum.