Philosophy of the Project
The basic philosophy of the EGPR educational project is the development of competence to solve problems by design. This requires the development of five specific capacities.
The EGPR course provides an overview of these capacities. A full development of sound design competence can only be reached after wide education and years of practical experience. The current course uses international and multidisciplinary cooperation to develop such competence.
1. The design capability, or the natural capacities, includes intelligence, imagination, creativeness, inventiveness, artfulness, technicality, pragmatism and productiveness. A good designer has developed, strengthened and balanced these capacities. Since the available time for the course is limited we concentrate on:
- optimal exploitation of the already available capacities
- harmonisation of the various problem solving approaches
- organisation/management capacities of the students.
2. The design attitude, or the way a designer is related to their profession, includes the designer's way of seeing, thinking and doing, which is manifest in:
- the way of thinking about practical creativeness
- the motivation and inspiration of creating useful things
- the enjoyment of inventing artefacts
- the mindset related to materialisation and realisation.
Working in virtual environments points to other specific elements of the designerly attitude, for example:
- liking problem-solving with a multidisciplinary flavour
- openness to sharing problems, knowledge and resources
- feeling responsibility towards others
- being accustomed to working in a multicultural environment.
3. The design knowledge, or the integration and application of multidisciplinary knowledge of the learned capabilities, includes formal and informal understanding and information. In design education, we pay attention to systematically obtaining, exploring, managing and applying knowledge. During the course, several sources of obtaining knowledge will be addressed:
- academic lectures
- industrial case studies
- exploratory research
- literature search
- learning from each other
- company visits
4. Design skills, or the abilities to carry out design actions well. They include (amongst others):
- handling information
- multidisciplinary cooperation
- application of research and design methods
- communication and exchange of technical information
- use of professional, internet-based communication equipment
- analysis of complex design problems and task allocation
- combining creative capacities with system development capacities
- project management
- prototyping and testing
- practising English language at a professional level.
5. Design experience, or the familiarity gained from seeing and doing things in the course of acting as a designer, and the obtained feelings and reflections related to designing and designs. Students come together with their own backgrounds and fields of experience, they share and combine this to create new experiences as a result of the synthesis of experiences. We think that the concept of the Academic Virtual Enterprise forms an excellent means that enables students to develop these competences.