175 © 2004 UICEE Global J. of Engng. Educ., Vol.8, No.2 Published in Australia INTRODUCTION Following graduation, it can take a considerable pe- riod of time for a designer to develop confidence and professional competence in industrial design. Many professionals would agree that it can take at least 10 years. This length of time is needed for the designer to build a database of experience and it is this experi- ence that the designer accesses during the process of designing. This is the way it has been, because the process of design has not basically changed over the years, and it has come to be accepted that a long pe- riod of apprenticeship to the design profession is es- sential after graduation. However, this suggests that the decision-making process of design is based upon experience and intuition. For many years, designers involved in research sought to place the design process on a more system- atic and rigorous foundation. However, this proved to be problematic and a large percentage of the effort in developing methodological techniques was unsuccess- ful. Designers generally repudiated methodological The Importance of Design Methods to Student Industrial Designers* Lance N. Green University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia Elivio Bonollo University of Canberra, University Drive, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia In this article, the authors discuss the predicament of student designers, where many struggle to develop expertise in the design process. Because of the repudiation of methodological techniques by many professional designers, the teaching of formal design methodologies has not achieved wide acceptance by educationalists in industrial design. As a consequence, practitioners who were not taught design methods largely fail to incorporate them into their professional design work. The purpose of this article is to review the situation with design methods, to explain the predicament of students as they struggle with the process of designing, and to argue the need for the broader introduction of systematic techniques so as to support the student design process. techniques because they believed they constrained design thinking and impaired creativity. As a conse- quence, formal design methodologies have not achieved wide acceptance by educationalists in indus- trial design. It has been shown that practitioners who were not taught design methods generally fail to include them into their professional design work [1]. But the debate does not consider the situation of the student designer who: … is expected to plunge into designing trying from the very outset to do what he does not know how to do, in order to get the sort of experience that will help him learn what designing means [2]. The above description by Schon represents a chaotic situation. The student has no database of experience, little knowledge of marketing, engineer- ing, manufacturing, the process of drawing, or even an understanding of the design or product develop- ment process. Frost has stated that it is little wonder that most students are scared witless by design and exhibit excruciating pencil-phobia [3]. The student faces this predicament because the context of industrial design education is centred on practice in design until such times as the student builds a substantial body of project experience. In this way, *A revised and expanded version of a lead paper presented at the 4 th Global Congress on Engineering Education, held in Bangkok, Thailand, from 5 to 9 July 2004. This paper was awarded the UICEE gold award (third grade) by popular vote of Conference participants for the most significant con- tribution to the field of engineering education.