From engineering to industrial design: issues of educating future engineers to systemic design

Within the recent “Ecam Engineering” five-year international program developed at Ecam Lyon in France, a “Design” specialization area is proposed to educate engineers to the issues of systemic design. This program has emerged from the collaboration of Ecam Lyon with Politecnico di Torino, Italy. By offering different courses from the two institutions to the students, this program attempts to broaden the scope of classical engineering curricula towards a large spectrum of “design” issues. However, there is a huge gap between the content and pedagogy of systemic design developed at Politecnico to address an audience of future industrial designers, and the classical engineering design curriculum based on methodological and systematized approaches. This paper discusses the conceptual and operational challenges faced in this program to manage efficiently the transition of the engineers’ curriculum towards sustainable design.