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Designing modern products and systems in an innovative, sustainable and competitive way demands the implementation of new paradigms in development organisations. Among these paradigms, Integration is of major importance. More specifically, the integration of all the different actors with specific roles in the complete product lifecycle is essential throughout the design process of a product or a system. In modern product and system development processes, design is no longer concentrated on a specific phase. Design goes beyond aesthetics to coverall functional aspects of a product or a system, thus driving the entire development process.
Design engineers are often obliged to work on the basis of vague and incomplete specifications of functional and aesthetic product or system properties, as well as requirements and constraints imposed by different lifecycle phases and actors. Without these specifications, however, integrated design is impossible to achieve. Thus, it is typically the implicit or explicit responsibility of design engineers to procure the information they need. This requires knowledge about the product or system lifecycle, and in particular about the experts involved in each phase of the lifecycle. It also demands specific skills to communicate with those experts so that designers can capture and capitalize on the experts’ information and knowledge.
Many of these integrated engineering skills are acquired throughout the professional career of engineers rather than in their initial education, as they require experiences in real working environments with complex interdisciplinary development projects. Engineers thus have the need of training and certification programs allowing them to improve and certify the integrated skills they acquire along the way. Today, such internationally recognized training and certification programs for job roles in modern manufacturing do not exist.
Many EMIRAcle member institutions have a long history in integrated design research and applications in several industrial sectors. EMIRAcle has partnered with the European Certification and Qualification Association (ECQA) to define and establish job roles, curricula and certifications in the domain of Integrated Engineering on the European level. The target is to define and describe the skills that characterise Integrated Engineering in order to provide skill-specific training modules and the corresponding training material, as well as internationally recognized certification. This issue focuses on iDesigner, an EU-project that has created a complete training and certification program in Integrated Design.
Contact: Andreas RIEL
