An investigation into a digital strategy for industrial design education

As the number of digital natives increases and the range of digital design tools / media continues to expand, it is timely to examine the potential for an entirely digital industrial design process that can be employed in practice and education. Following a literature review, a draft Digital Industrial Design (DID) strategy that focuses on the core design activities of sketching, drawing, model making, and prototyping was generated. A paper-based, theoretical model was established and presented to graduating students, academics and practitioners. The results indicated that, while graduating students were interested in employing an approach based entirely on digital methods, the majority had doubts about its capacity to replace conventional and hybrid methods. The removal of paper-based sketching, the conventional hands-on experience when model making, and the cost of digital tools were identified as primary concerns. Although academics believed that the future of industrial design programmes would become increasingly digital, it was identified that current programmes were failing to exploit the opportunities afforded by these technologies fully.