GUIDING DESIGN DIRECTIONS IN INDUSTRY-COLLABORATIVE GRADUATION PROJECTS THROUGH A UNIFYING THEME

Each year, the Graduation Projects of our fourth-year industrial design students address a wide range of design challenges, demonstrating the significant value of industrial design in creating innovative products, services, and systems. These projects, with commercial relevance to current or future markets, are supported by external advisors from diverse sectors, such as electronics, healthcare, transportation, and defense. This collaborative approach reflects the multi- and trans-disciplinary nature of complex design challenges. For three consecutive years, we introduced a semester theme to unify the projects and encourage creative thinking across sectors. One such theme, “Connection-Connectivity-Connectedness,” focused on designing products, systems, and services that foster emotional, psychological, social, cognitive, physical, and environmental bonds. This approach allowed students to engage with a broad range of perspectives while exploring innovative solutions. Although the design studio instructors, having since moved on to another course, are no longer involved in the Graduation Projects studio, the practice of setting a theme has been maintained. This paper explores the studio activities that supported the theme development in students’ projects, culminating in an analysis of how the theme manifested in the final outcomes. It also reflects on the benefits of using a unifying theme to guide student design work and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. The paper concludes with the insight that themes, when applied to projects involving diverse sectors, can encourage fresh insights and innovative approaches, prompting companies to look at a design brief from new angles and reach innovative solutions.