Improving design education at Kanazawa Intitute of Technology

A Task Force made up of a multicultural group of visiting professors at KIT, worked together with Japanese counterparts to develop materials to Improve Design Education At Kanazawa Institute of Technology (IDEA-KIT), Japan. The IDEA-KIT Task Force decided to use the Design Engineering Process that we teach to address the problem related to improving design education. The Task Force mission was to identify problems and needs in Engineering Design Education (EDE), to develop design specifications for educational materials to meet these needs, to generate a large number of concepts for ways to satisfy the design specifications, and select the best and most feasible ones for development to a level appropriate for classroom use in the autumn quarter of 1999. To facilitate implementation at KIT, all materials developed were to be modular, easy to use for both the faculty and students, and provide guidance in managing courses and standardising practices.As with any new programme, there were significant challenges in developing and implementing the EDE programme at KIT. While some challenges were anticipated, most did not show their true difficulty until experience in running the programme was available