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With the release of headsets such as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in 2016, fully immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has become available for industrial designers to represent and communicate design ideas. However, how this development will affect industrial design education practice is not clear enough yet. The purpose of this study is to reveal and discuss the current status of using VR in industrial design education and potentials of it.

In the first part of the study, the use of computer technology in industrial design education and how VR can be positioned in the existing system is discussed by the acceptance of “design” as “representation”. In the second part, the literature review carried out to unveil and analyse the efforts for using VR in industrial design practice and education is presented. The results of the review are interpreted together with the design process in industrial design education.

VR has the potential for changing the operating ways of not only sketching, visualising, modelling, prototyping, presenting, demonstrating and evaluating design ideas, but also getting inspiration and collaborating in industrial design education. However, it is first necessary to solve the issue of how it will be integrated into industrial design education.

This paper presents the preliminary presumptions regarding the integration of VR into industrial design education that can contribute to future studies.

The paper intends to determine the extent to which environmental sustainability issues are integrated in the curricula of industrial design programs in Australian universities.

Industrial design lecturers and program heads were invited to participate in a web‐based survey on their university's industrial design curricula. Online university handbooks were also examined to determine which courses cover sustainability aspects. Survey results were then tabulated and analysed using descriptive statistics.

The study shows that, while there is a concern that sustainable development issues are important and relevant to design courses, the permeation of environmental sensitivity through most industrial design curricula, and indeed among design academics, is only starting to gain ground. Comparative examination of the curricular structures in Australian universities offering degree programs in industrial and product design revealed that, on average, 12 out of every 100 credit points earned have sustainability content.

The paper informs industrial design academics that much more work has to be done in order to educate the next generation of designers about their responsibilities to the planet and its people. It tells them where we currently are and the gaps that we have to bridge in order to achieve environmental sustainability.

The paper is original in the field of Australian industrial design education, and builds on work in other disciplines about incorporating sustainability aspects in tertiary education.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the first experiences (activities, attitudes and inclinations) of an undergraduate student team with eco-design activities.

Undergraduate students of an industrial design course were invited to participate in the design project. The activities of students were carried out in the class titled in Japanese “Sogo Project” (Overall Project). The project is experimental learning based on pedagogical case studies that students propose practical designs with a sustainable approach.

According to the activities and attitudes of the student team, they showed interest in focusing on sustainable consumption and consequently leant towards a socio-cultural rather than a technological eco-design approach in their works. The barriers to design education for sustainable design were found, and the student team expressed that the available support tool during their design process was complex. They also expressed that the tool was not compatible with their academic skills and background.

This paper has limited participants, resources, time and contextual scale. Few Japanese educators are skilled in eco-design, and eco-design modules are also poorly integrated into undergraduate and graduate industrial-design courses at Japanese universities.

The paper contributes to an initial discussion in the field of Japanese industrial-design education regarding the principles of and barriers to design education for sustainability.

This chapter presents a case study on integrating sustainable development (SD) into the Industrial Design Bachelor’s course at Tecnologico de Monterrey (TEC) in Mexico. The research is being conducted at TEC, where the lead author is a Professor of Architecture. Mexico has a five-year national development plan: the “Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2013–2018” (PND). This provides a basis for guiding the policies and programs of the Government of Mexico. The focus of this study is on the PND’s “quality education goal to make scientific, technological, and innovation development pillars for sustainable economic and social progress.” This case study investigates a curriculum intervention, utilizing interviews with students to gather and analyze their responses to the university’s development of sustainability competencies. Their responses are explored through comparing a traditional semester with a semester in which sustainability contents and assessment criteria were added to the curriculum of the Industrial Design Workshop courses. The results reveal that the students recognized a significant advance in their development of sustainability competencies and that this had resulted from this curriculum intervention. This chapter proposes that the findings of the study indicate that a holistic approach has the potential to contribute significantly to SD education in Mexico.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate undergraduate industrial design students’ perception of sustainable design concepts and how their conceptualization evolves as a function of their attendance to a specific sustainable design studio (SDS) course.

Two groups of students participated in the study. Students who did not attend to SDS were in the control group, whereas students who attended SDS were in the experimental group. In total, 22 concepts, which have been highlighted in literature and the SDS course, were selected as keywords. Participants were asked to provide relatedness scores of these keywords before and after they attended the course. The data were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and pathfinder (PF) networks.

Results indicate that the SDS caused a change in the conceptualization of sustainable design concepts parallel to the course outcomes and the literature. Some concepts were highlighted as conveyors that guide students to conceptualize sustainable development and design.

This study is considered a case study focusing on declarative knowledge, and owing to the low number of participants, the results should be carefully interpreted.

The findings may support design educators to enhance their courses and promote deeper debates on teaching sustainable design.

Two specific dimensions were found from the analysis of multidimensional scaling, and several conveyor concepts were identified from PF networks. Allocating proposed dimensions and concepts into a course may have the potentials to enhance students’ perception of sustainability concepts.

This paper narrates a case study on design thinking-based education work in an industrial design honours program. Student projects were developed in a multi-disciplinary setting across a Computing and Engineering faculty that allowed promoting technologically and user-driven innovation strategies.

A renewed culture and environment for industrial design (ID) students emphasised seeking functionality and fidelity, user and society value over beauty and form factors alone. The pedagogical approach sought to determine the new industrial products reality with an increasing contribution by design thinking, and its associated methodologies that are currently advancing typical ID.

In conclusion, the authors propose a number of reflections as recommendations, which may be useful for educational institutions contemplating similar curriculum makeovers to their design degrees.

Our research provides valuable lessons to other design courses that wish to invigorate their curriculum with technical and design thinking-based advances.

Teaching sustainable development at the higher education level requires that existing curricula are supplemented with multi-disciplinary (and sometimes multi-national) collaboration and integrated thinking. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of a particular framework for business model innovation for sustainability-as-flourishing that is used as a boundary object in the context of interdisciplinary, peer-assessed distance learning. This study is positioned in the broader picture of enlarging curricular content so as to reflect the systemic and interconnected nature of socio-technical and economic developments. The motivation behind this study is the authors’ wish to achieve a deeper understanding of how students engage with the complex concept of sustainable business modelling, while using the flourishing business canvas (FBC).

An experiment was conducted on the use of the FBC as a boundary object among 52 engineering students at two universities. Data were provided by the following: iterations of the FBC; oral and written peer feedback; and an online survey.

Based on an evaluation of the experiment, this study shows that the FBC supports the use of multi-disciplinary, multi-national peer and distance learning in sustainability education.

This study used one test condition of multi-disciplinary, multi-national collaboration for peer and distance learning at one point in time. Additional tests, using the tools and approaches of this study, are needed.

Various tools and methods for use in education have been developed that support a new view of sustainability –sustainability-as-flourishing. Extant research focusses primarily on the development of tools and methods in this area. Not enough attention has been paid to the analysis of their implementation and use in higher education. This paper seeks to fill that research gap.

This paper aims to investigate the intermediary role of universities in spreading design for sustainability into industry.

Three case studies were undertaken on Delft University of Technology, Design for Sustainability Program from The Netherlands; a center on sustainable consumption and production; and Prof. Göksel Demirer from Middle East Technical University, Environmental Engineering Department from Turkey.

The process and evolution of the intermediary roles of the cases are explained. Three types of structures, through which universities undertake intermediary role, are investigated via the cases studies, a program, a center and an individual scientist.

This study is a first attempt to investigate the intermediary role of universities in the design for sustainability field.

Although the methods and approaches of sustainable design have been developing for more than 20 years, their application in design education and the design process is still under-examined. This study aims to investigate how to integrate sustainability into project-based undergraduate courses in industrial design education, where sustainability has recently been introduced into the curriculum.

Two workshops were carried out as pilot studies within two different elective courses. The scope of the study included sustainable design approaches at both the product and product-service system innovation levels.

The findings show that choosing between the two levels and the sustainable design approach is the most important challenge that students face during the design process. Moreover, the project brief influences the choice of the approach.

Following the findings, a sustainable design process model for the project-based undergraduate design courses was proposed. Finally, a new course curriculum on sustainable design was developed based on the findings from the study.

There is a multiplicity of facets, specialisations and skills required to design the matching spectrum of products that are produced. These products range from those where appearance or consumer appeal have high priority, for example in certain types of pottery, glass or graphic illustration, to items where functionalism is paramount, for example in engines, transformers and scientific equipment. This broad spectrum falls into two categories often referred to as industrial design and engineering design respectively.