Interdisciplinary product design and East-Asian Collaborative Design education Program

This paper discusses the interdisciplinary product design course aimed at teaching consumer-centered design methods for novel products and services using interdisciplinary design teams. The project-based learning is applied and each design team is required to define its own design problems based on the analysis of consumers and trends. The course teaches general design process, consumer and trend analysis methods, creative and rational methods, teamwork and design skills with the combinations of lectures, projects and hand-on workshops. The interdisciplinary product design course also includes the East-Asian Collaborative Design Program, in which the students from China, Japan and Taiwan participate, and as a result, global view for developing products and services could be fostered. The effects of the interdisciplinary product design course are discussed with the project-based case study. It could be found that the students are more flexible to other disciplines and cultures, and more sensitive to consumers and trends to find their potential needs.