A PILOT STUDY: A CASE STUDY OF DESIGN TEACHING APPLYING THE INTERNET CROWDSOURCING TECHNOLOGY FOR UNDERGRADUATE DESIGN STUDENTS

Since the design education system was first established and spread to the public by Bauhaus in Weimar, during 1919, people began to realise the necessity and rationality of design education in various design domains. Currently, design has strongly combined with the new emerged internet technologies (i.e., crowdsourcing technology), and recent research results suggested that crowdsourcing design method (i.e., Crowdsourced Design Framework) provides innovations for design. Consequently, the teaching of crowdsourced design method for the undergraduate design students has become increasingly important. Unfortunately, at present, it was hardly found that this application in the current design course module. In this paper, the authors firstly investigated the application of crowdsourced design method (i.e., Crowdsourced Design Framework) for undergraduate industrial design students. This paper is structured by 5 sections. Section 1 gives a brief introduction of the development of design education, Internet crowdsourcing technology and the latest related research findings on it. Section 2, authors illustrate the Crowdsourcing-based Design Teaching Workflow (CBDTW). Section 3 shows a case study using the CBDTW for the 2nd year undergraduate industrial design students in Sichuan University. Students' design results are shown and discussed in section 4. This paper ends by section 5 as the conclusion, limitation and the future work. Students applied crowdsourcing technology to generate design concepts, evaluate designs and improve designs. Importantly, it is worth introducing the latest crowdsourced design research results to students, which potentially helps them understand how design research changes the way of design.