Introduction of IDEEA (International Design & Engineering Education Association) 2021 Program

ABSTRACT

IDEEA program provides a platform for academia and industry to meet, exchange ideas, foster collaboration and make new friendships. The IDEEA program, which started in 2019, is on its third year this year. The purpose of this program is for students to find solutions of innovative designs or strategies as potential answers to a given set of requirements. Engineering design tasks for specific purpose drones have been carried out for the past two years, but this year, the development of future mobility was selected as the subject. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of future automobile using C (Connected), A (Autonomous), S (Shared), and E (Electric) as the keywords, 215 engineering and design students from 26 universities around the world form 16 teams. In addition, despite the Covid 19 pandemic environment, various online tools are being used to efficiently cooperate globally. The contents of this project are to design, model, and package an innovative future mobility design and engineering concept. In November of 2020, the program was launched with a general announcement of this year’s assignments. In December, team composition started, and the entire student team formation was completed and the collaboration started in March. It was easier for students to focus on conducting the project during “the team collaboration phase 1”, when all universities around the world were offering classes. The teams had to select a megacity. Then they would develop ideas and define concepts for the future mobility, appropriate for their selected metropolitan area. The midterm presentation took place on May 14th, and the purpose of this presentation was to determine how well cooperation among participating students have been progressing. Students will carry out user-needs research, industrial design and the engineering specifications and develop a “soft” precision mock-up and a CAD model of their final solution. They will present a series of development processes and their virtual mock up on the final presentation, scheduled to be on July 26–27. The IDEEA program faces many challenges due to the wide variety of the participating universities, different majors, semester starting dates and media restrictions in different countries. At the same time, the challenges of the global student teams form the foundation for an important teaching content of the course. The students can experience the collaborative work of engineers and designers in developing real world products in advance. This program will give recommendations for implementing an international, multidisciplinary collaboration course. A structured approach will be documented regarding the organization and project design, the team initiation, teaching concept and the project outcome in terms of quality of the delivered results as well as the learning success of the students. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.