ABSTRACT

Industrial Design Students in Mexico carry educational backwardness that does not allow them to learn new skills related to problem-solving, critical thinking and technology. Especially if Industrial Design has had to acknowledge that products will have to respond to the demands brought by the Internet of Things. Mexico is a struggling country in terms of design and innovation as it has been in the bottom of most indicators used by the OECD to measure science, technology, and innovation in the last ten years, obtaining the 56º position on the Global Innovation Index. We foresee that Mexican companies would need to recruit talent that could implement innovation and technology on a faster pace with a deep understanding of the limitations of its context and a problem-solving attitude toward new challenges. We describe how, by using Critical Design and Challenge-based Learning, we could incentivize students to develop skills related to critical thinking, problem solving and technology. A case study is described with its methodologies and tools on implementing Critical Design on challenge-based-learning methods. Through a survey, we learned that after each exercise, most of the students perceived that they felt more confident using and understanding technology, as well as having a better understanding of their context, learning new methodologies and felt more prepared to face their professional life. By sharing our methodologies and results through this article, we hope to encourage other scholars, design educators and designers to use Critical Design as a tool for education in an ever-changing context.

Keywords: Industrial Design, Critical Design, Challenge-based Education, Critical Thinking, Educational Innovation