In September 2021 the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering has implemented a completely revised bachelor. Important differences between the old and the new bachelor are its focus on design for higher complexity, the teacher as a coach, and the need for students to learn in an autonomous way. Within the bachelor, first year engineering students are introduced to the world of physical embodiment of products. This includes materials and design, manufacturing techniques, functional analysis, product architecture and mechanics modelling. In the past years we used a classical approach in teaching mechanics of materials using direct instructions and problem-based learning as the learning approach. Unfortunately, many design coaches observed that the acquired engineering knowledge was applied superficially or even left out of scope in students' design projects. The complete overhaul of the bachelor and the seemingly short retention of topics related to product engineering, made us change our learning approach from Direct Instruction to Productive Failure (PF). Making mistakes is an important condition for learning, and Productive Failure incorporates this while promoting autonomous learning. In essence, Productive Failure is a method that fosters effective learning and fits very well with a general design approach of iterative and explorative learning. During the development of UPE, we designed several workshops in a PF kind of fashion and applied it in the 2021 course. During the run we came across several hurdles in teaching, related to workshop design, and the impact of changing learning culture, and the teachers' role. This paper will discuss our findings when applying Productive Failure in our own class which is used to improve the course and line up the educational team in becoming productive-failure teachers. ... Read more

Teaching manufacturing techniques to 250 bachelor level industrial design engineering students is not straightforward, especially when a fair amount of abstraction is required. Our students find it difficult to grasp abstract matters through a textbook, even when they have lectures delivered by co-authors of the book. We found that students avoided putting their brains to work early-on in the 10-week course, and then faced difficulty nearing the final exam. To overcome this, we encouraged students to come prepared to workshops, where they completed a selection of the textbook exercises under staff guidance. Initially this worked well. Over the years though, as the elaborations of those exercises were shared online, student attendance dropped, despite the available and inviting staff. What more could we do? A solution was found in changing the activities performed by the students. Inspired by Kuttenkeuler and Edström1, their concept of ‘time-on-task’ was tried in our education practice. A small part of the grade for theory was earned during the workshops, based on a reward system for delivering a convincing presentation of exercises on the topic at hand. It proved that this method made students come better prepared, in bigger numbers and with a remarkable positive impact on their final exam success rate. ... Read more

Falling of older persons resulting in injuries is a common problem (Hartholt, 2010). The annual probability to experience a fall for people aged 65 years and over is 30% (Hartholt, 2010, 2011). There is limited information about the location where fall injuries occur, but bathrooms commonly are believed to be a particularly hazardous location (Span, 2009). The aim of this research is to quantify the design requirements for the cross section of safe grab rail design parameters for the bathroom. Based on past research several shapes are evaluated with in a pulling experiment. The tested grab rails consisted of four different sizes of circular grab rails, two oval grab rails and a squared grab rail with two different finger protrusions. The subjects were instructed to hold the rail while the pull-force was increased. The test ended when they could not hold the rail anymore. The peak force was then used as data. It was concluded that cylindrical handrails with a diameter of 28 mm and 32 mm are more suitable to apply high forces on, than cylindrical handrail with diameter 45 mm, oval handrails or squared handrails. Practitioner Summary: When installing a safe rail in the bathroom to prevent falling, especially for the elderly population it is advised to use a cylindrical grip with a diameter of 28 mm or 32 mm. ... Read more