New industry/education links in Brunel's BSc in industrial design

The Department of Design at Brunel has been involved in the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative on a number of activities including student centred learning and the introduction of industrial input into project work. Many Art and Design colleges have included industrial sponsorship in a block project, often in the form of a competition. Because our BSc in Industrial Design is largely linear in its teaching, in order to accommodate its high technological content, this pattern of block projects did not fit us at all well. We wish to report on our success in establishing long term working relationships with companies, spanning the entire year, and to describe the benefits of this collaboration, both to the students and to the whole department.