Philosophy

Philosophy of the Project

The basic philosophy of the E-GPR educational project is about the development of the competence to solve problems by design, which requires a complex whole of five specific capacities. At this place we give only a very brief impression. A full development of sound design competence can only be reached after wide education and years of practical experience. The current course gives the opportunity of getting an impression of such competence using international and multi-disciplinary cooperation.

A. 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 concentrated on:

  • optimal exploitation of the already available capacities
  • harmonization of the various problem solving approaches
  • process organization/management capacities of the students.

B. The design attitude, or the way a designer is related to his/her profession. It includes the way of designer seeing, thinking and doing, which manifests in:

  • the way of thinking about practical creativeness,
  • the motivation and inspiration of creating useful things
  • the enjoyment of inventing artefacts
  • the mind set related to materialization and realization.

Working in virtual environments points at other specific elements of the designerly attitude, for example:

  • liking problem solving with multidisciplinary flavour
  • openness to sharing problems, knowledge and resources
  • feeling responsibility towards others
  • being accustomed to working in a multicultural environment.

C. The design knowledge, or the integration and application of multidisciplinary knowledge the learned capabilities. It includes formal and informal understanding and information. In design education we pay attention to systematically obtaining, exploration, management and application of knowledge. During the course several sources of obtaining knowledge will be addressed:

  • academic lectures
  • industrial case studies
  • explorative research
  • literature search
  • brainstorming
  • learning from each other
  • company visits,
  • self-management.

D. Design skills or the abilities to do design actions well. They include amongst others:

  • handling information
  • multi-disciplinary 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
  • practicing English language on professional level.

E. 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. The students come together with their own backgrounds and fields of experience, they share and combine it, and create new experiences as a result of the synthesis of experiences to generate new extensions. We think that the concept of the Academic Virtual Enterprise forms an excellent means that enables the students to develop these competences.