Creating Practitioners of Design for Quality through Education

The above paper described my experiences of teaching engineering students to be able to create products of the highest design quality. The paper identifies the need to have a good understanding of the needs of the customer and to be able to create products, which have a range of quality attributes. A comparison is made between the design approach of engineering students versus that of industrial design students; the merits of the latter being the greater awareness of customer needs and a strong desire to create innovative products. At IKS, we believe that the designer often has an incomplete knowledge about the user-requirements in each life-phase of the product. One of our current research programmes involves identifying more effective means of recording the needs of the customer and maintaining the designer’s awareness of these throughout the design process. We believe the products designers create would be of higher quality and provide greater customer satisfaction if designers were continually aware of all life-phase needs.