In the Integrated Product Design master’s at Industrial Design Engineering, there is a growing diversity in students. In recent years we increasingly noticed that diversity could lead to complications within the various student teams. Examples are miscommunication, frustration, and interpersonal conflicts. This growing diversity between the team members strongly appeals to their ability to deal with these complications in a constructive way. Via a KPI tracking system we kept track of team performance and we identified four aspects affecting the team dynamics within the Advanced Embodiment Design project team [1]. This paper presents the case study of one of the student design-teams which was highly dysfunctional in design approach and conflicting cultural differences. It made this group perform at a lower level. Theory U [2] and dialogue techniques [3] were an unfamiliar approach for student design teams. Interventions using generative conversations stimulated connectedness between the team members and improved the team dynamics. The use of culture mapping [10] proofed to be a valuable tool to bridge the culture gap. Although this case study only describes one student design team, the drastic improvements resulted in the team winning the iF Design Talent Award 2020. The findings are promising, and further research is needed to investigate the generalizability of these approaches for Industrial Design Engineering education.@en

Only 35 percent of the recent graduates are women. The figures are even lower for traditionally male dominated workforces such as engineering and robotics as women constitute only 12 percent of the engineering workforce. It is quite evident that we cannot ignore the gender equation when it comes to bringing in more equity in the workforce. As even the toys are heavily gendered, to take an example. Right from the way girls are prompted to play with Barbies and boys with G.I. Joes, this societal conditioning influences their future interest towards professions. In order to counter act the disparity in the STEM professions, a play based learning approach through the medium of soft robotics is used to get preschoolers equally interested towards the field of robotics in a gender-accessible manner. Silly Stompers consists of a reconfigurable base to which wide range of soft actuator blocks could be connected in various ways to create custom body movements. This provides a very tangible, screen-free, open ended experience for pre-schoolers through a fun way by allowing creating to create various pumping patterns. This provides compatibility with LEGO providing more open-ended outcomes. The learning outcomes mainly focus on constructive play and role play for pre-schoolers through the medium of soft inflatable actuators.