to tell this story, so that it would remain as an academic testimony of how to innovate in the classroom and how to unite product design and integrity in a freshman year course in a challenging major such as PDE.
Thus, this book is a travel log that narrates how the exercise began, how it was developed and what the results were. The introduction explains which departments at Universidad EAFIT participated in the project and why they coordinated their efforts to give it life. Chapter 1 describes what is meant by designing with meaning, from a universal inspiration and with something as immaterial as light. Chapter 2 narrates the development of the exercise, its pedagogical strategy, and the most important findings. Finally, the conclusions reflect on the process from the standpoint of integrity and results presented by the students. The book concludes with photographs of the luminaries as a catalog.
The design process is infinite, and you can always innovate by proposing new challenges. We hope that this book will be a source of inspiration to anyone who holds and examines it, skims through it, or reads it carefully. It is an invitation to enter the world of creativity, design and humanity. It is a point of inflection to return to the understanding that “what is essential is invisible to the eyes.”
Uniting efforts, building a team, and developing projects with an interdisciplinary approach is –clearly– a winning bet that can yield much fruit. This notion gave birth to the joint work between the Project 2 course, a subject that is part of the freshman year of PDE, the Center for Integrity and the Department of Artistic Development. In this spirit of cooperation, these three departments joined together to accompany the students in the design of a floor lamp, inspired by the book The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The role of each department within the University and its role in the project is explained below.
Product design engineering is the term used to define the profession of the people who design and develop products from the standpoint of the end user and industrial production. In addition to the technical and economic performance of the products, they must be novel, easy to understand and operate, and capable of generating a visual and aesthetic appeal to successfully compete in the market (see Figure 1). In this respect, product design engineering merges design factors, which make a product desired by users; engineering factors, which guarantee its technological feasibility and; finally, market factors, which support the product’s viability as a business.
Figure 1. Profile of a Product Design Engineer
Profile of a Product Design Engineer
To achieve this level of professional training, PDE has an integrated factor area of study. The objective of this area is the integration of all the program’s study areas through their practical application in the development of a product design project. Consequently, using current theoretical and practical training principles of the university, this area seeks to integrate engineering, design, marketing and contextual factors, while favoring learning methods and employing them within a methodology to solve problems.
Project 2 is a design course that is part of the integrated factor area of the major’s second semester. It is meant to be the focal point of the semester. The course has a common structure based on three fundamental elements that define its themes, scope and methodological strategies: the pedagogical objective of the project, the context, and the design and construction of artifacts, which are described below.
• The pedagogical objective of the project: the project is the focal point and the ultimate aim of all the design exercises that are developed during the course. In this case, the pedagogical objective of Project 2 is for the students to become metacognitive, that is to say, to reflect on their own design processes. The goal is to train the students in technical and aesthetic elements and user needs.
• The context: is the environment in which the project is framed, and which allows the student to understand the problems that arise in the various segments of design in general. In this case, the work is carried out in the context of a home, in a category of artifacts that are characteristic to the major: furniture.
• The design and construction of artifacts: the purpose of this element is for the students to acquire and apply technical and formal knowledge in solving problems related to the design context that has been defined for the exercise. Two exercises are developed in the course: a standing luminaire and a piece of furniture for a specific user.
In 2011, Universidad EAFIT started to develop a program of academic integrity with the idea of reducing academic fraud and promoting a culture of integrity. The program did not only seek to promote the culture of integrity in the classroom, but also in several spheres of life of those who were part of the EAFIT community. The project –called, “Atreverse a Pensar,” (Dare to Think in English)– designed a strong communicational component which effectively gave visibility to issue of integrity at the University. Additionally, an educational component was created with the idea of taking ethical reflection into the classroom. However, despite multiple efforts such as: conferences with experts, talks, film forums and studies, which served as a thermometer for academic honesty within the institution, the project directors understood that changing behavior is very complex and implied a longer-term program.
From the beginning, the members of the program have believed that communication plays an important role when it comes to highlighting integrity, being the controversial issue that it is. It was essential that the entire university community knew about the institution’s commitment to academic integrity. In this vein, they were aware that powerful and provocative messages on billboards, posters and virtual cards would be of great help to achieve that goal. Likewise, they intuited that the space and conditions for a genuine, profound reflection to be made, only existed within the singularity that emerged in each of the courses taught at the university, where a very special professor-student relationship could be built.
Over time, there were cases in which professors from EAFIT’s six schools (Administration, Engineering, Law, Humanities, Economics and Finance, and Sciences) effectively included the question of integrity at some point during the course and invited the students to question their decisions in moral terms. The students were invited to analyze business case studies in the light of ethics and to reflect on corruption as daily practice which has taken root in Colombian politics and – to some extent – the sphere of private enterprises.
The overall result after six years of the implementation of Dare to Think was positive. On one hand, there was a joy that this genuine desire to lead a project of applied ethics had been carried out at Universidad EAFIT. On the other hand, the deeper knowledge of the phenomenon of academic integrity – thanks to the lessons from all the years of work – required a position of greater commitment to continue the efforts, which would need a thought process with a more strategic look and a long-term horizon.
Thus, in July of 2016, the Center for Integrity was born and officially inaugurated on February 23, 2017. The ceremony was honored by the presence of the Spanish
