STUDENTS' KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION ON WEB BASED DESIGN TOOLS FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERS

To teach design students about the options and opportunities of web 2.0 and 3.0 for industrial design engineers, an experimental exercise has been set up. More than 100 design students had to find a web based design tool through a collaborative search. Subsequently they had to apply the tool in a design process on one of their own designs. To share their experiences and to contribute to knowledge construction about web based design tools, the students had to write an article on our industrial design engineering wiki to share their experiences. This way a collection of design tools has been created which is available to the students. The articles have been written by and for students and they include a review and an application example. At the end of the exercise the students had to present their design tool and experiences to each other. The paper describes the experiment and the results. The collected information about the evaluated tools has been structured. The tools have been classified into categories: Construction: Calculators and Selectors; Sustainability; Financial; Fuzzy front end and Marketing; Production and Materials; Transport; Electronics; Aesthetics and Creativity; Team work; and Ergonomics. Together with the students the actual area of rapidly developing web based search tools, design tools and open knowledge repository tools has been made accessible and familiar to the students.