DIEC Projects

The DIEC will take commissions for projects from industry. Projects will improve the usefulness, usability and desirability of services and increase their efficiency and effectiveness for the client organisation. Project clients will originate from many sectors but initial focus of the DIEC will be on healthcare, transport and business support.

DIEC Project Teams – a pool of talent

In this age of complexity, current design education processes are still steeped in the tradition of cultivating the individual and his/her skill within a discipline. It seems clear that the only way to face the “design objects” of today is to address them in multi-disciplinary teams. Designers concerned with the aesthetics of everyday life must collaborate with specialists in “materials” such as business processes and government policy.

The old professional ideals were of the individual’s technical mastery, taught by a master. The new ideals are of cultivating the power of the design team, and mastering a broad range of deep knowledge for the purpose of meaningful and sustainable design solutions.

As all projects undertaken at the DIEC are team projects, students will be supported to learn or advance to very high levels of team skills mastery:

• How to form strong teams
• How to “be” in teams
• How to harness “creative tension” in teams
• How to learn in teams.

The supportive learning processes will both cause and allow the identification and matching of individuals’ and teams’ requirements for existing or enhanced skills. It will build on common language and values and be supported by information processes that report on project progress and in parallel on individual contributions.

Projects based

Learning processes at the DIEC are in support of delivering successful projects. Accordingly, working together with a common goal, students learn to respect others’ professional competence, and leverage their own. They learn to translate between the “languages” of art, humanities, science and business disciplines, and learn from them so that students that grow from the project curriculum enter professional life with excellent team-working skills in addition to deep service design skills.