Design Innovation, including the topical areas of Design Thinking, Business Design, Organizational Design, Design Engineering and Systems Thinking, focuses on the development of key mindsets and skillsets for professionals interested in the Innovation Economy, society, and community.
Design may be the single most important factor that will distinguish those that can be replaced by machines from those that are fundamental to a healthy, developed and fair society.
The IbD programme uses design to span across the disciplines of engineering, innovation, business, entrepreneurship, management, and industrial design, and will contribute to foster expedited communication across fields, building leaders of global product-service-systems that can work effectively and efficiently across the full value chain.
The programme is imbued with SUTD’s unique pedagogy and a vibrant design and hands-on culture within and outside the classroom, supported by the 4-Dimensional Big-Design (4D Big-D) framework. It also brings its future graduates to a level in which they can collaborate effectively with graduates and professionals.
The IbD assumes a designation that is novel, even internationally. It is a horizontal programme, attracting students to a paradigm in which products, systems and services are developed concurrently with a design-centric mindset and across every discipline, domain and sector. Although the programme is directed at technology intensive product-service-systems, the entire value chain of products, services, and systems must be taken into account from the early stages of development, in the true nature of a design thinking mindset.
There is currently no Master of Engineering programme in Singapore that aims to promote and advance design innovation and design thinking in an integrated multi-disciplinary and holistic design education approach across several fields of knowledge. This programme will bridge the gap across multiple engineering programmes, architecture, social sciences, and many other disciplines, giving students tools, skills, and mindsets to work effectively and efficiently together under the umbrella of design.
The programme has immersion in its core, where prospective students will be exposed to three one-to-two week, off-class experiences – a design accelerator at the beginning of the programme, a supply chain and design reality check trip overseas (at a university or company where design thinking is taught/practiced), and an entrepreneurship accelerator experience at the end of year 1. These experiences will foster a student’s capacity to innovate, based on well-rounded and grounded design innovation and design thinking mindsets. The consistent active-learning and hands-on approach coupled with the discover-define-develop-deliver design cycle and access to in-house prototyping and manufacturing facilities will enable a culture of design teams in a project-based multidisciplinary learning environment.