Design and technology – a decade of integrated curriculum development in product design at the University of Wolverhampton

This paper is a retrospective analysis of the development of an integrated curriculum in product design at Wolverhampton which brings together creative design, technology, materials, manufacture and computing. In the late 1980s the Schools of Art and Design, Engineering, Technology and Computing decided to introduce what at that time was a new type of degree in product design with a multidisciplinary approach that drew from expertise across the institution. The BSc (Hons) in computer aided product design which had its first student intake in 1989 aimed to develop a product designer with a richer blend of skills between design, technology and engineering, but which also put the student at the centre and developed a curriculum that fostered independent learning. Over the last decade a group of undergraduate honours awards have grown out of the successful computer aided product design degree including a BA in industrial design, a BSc in computer aided industrial design, and a BSc in computer aided engineering design. This paper reflects on the evolution of this curriculum in design over the last 10 years, concentrating on the following innovative areas: 1. development of independent learning to foster academic and practical design skills 2. integrating the technological and creative elements in the design project work 3. meeting future design, technological, and sociological needs through curriculum development

A hp-adaptive discontinuous Galerkin finite element method for accurate configurational force brittle crack propagation

Engineers require accurate determination of the configurational force at the crack tip for fracture fatigue analysis and accurate crack propagation. However, obtain- ing highly accurate crack tip configuration force values is challenging with numer- ical methods requiring knowledge of the stress field around the crack tip a priori. In this thesis, the symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin finite element method is combined with a residual based a posteriori error estimator which drives a hp-adaptive mesh refinement scheme to determine accurate solutions of the stress field about about the crack. This facilitates the development of a novel method to calculate the crack tip configurational force that is accurate, requires no a priori knowledge of the stress field about the crack tip with, its error bound by an error estimator which is calculated a posteriori. Benchmark values of the crack tip con- figurational force are presented for problems containing multiple mixed mode cracks in both isotropic and anisotropic materials. Additionally, the hp-adaptivity is com- bined with a mathematical analysis of the stress field at the crack tip to critique the convergence and limitations of other methods in the literature to calculate the crack tip configurational force. Two methods for staggered quasi-static crack prop- agation are also presented. An rp-adaptive method which is simple to implement and computationally inexpensive, element edges aligned with the crack propagation path with the exploitation of the discontinuous Galerkin edge sti↵ness terms exist- ing along element interfaces to propagate a crack. The second method is denoted the hpr-adaptive method which combines the accurate computation of the crack tip configuration force with r-adaptivity to produce a computationally expensive but accurate method to propagate multiple cracks simultaneously. Further, for indeter- minate systems, an average boundary condition that restrains rigid body motion and rotation is introduced to make the system determinate

The coupled dual boundary element-scaled boundary finite element method for efficient fracture mechanics

A novel numerical method is presented for applications to general fracture mechanics problems in engineering. The coupled dual boundary element-scaled boundary finite element method (DBE-SBFEM) incorporates the numerical accuracy of the SBFEM and the geometric versatility of the DBEM. Background theory, detailed derivations and literature reviews accompany the extensions made to the methods constituents necessary for their coupling as part of the present work. The coupled DBE-SBFEM, its constituent components and their application to linear elastic fracture mechanics are critically assessed and presented with numerical examples to demonstrate both method convergence and improvements over previous work. Further, a proof of concept demonstrates an alternative formation of the DBEM that both negates the need for hyper-singular integration and lends itself to a wider variety of imposed boundary conditions. Conclusions to this work are drawn and further recommendations for research in this area are made

Higher education in the new millennium - the challenge of teaching practical craft and design skills

The last decade before the new millennium has been a period of radical change in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. The change initiated by the 1988 Educational Reform Act has seen many HE institutions in the polytechnic sector gaining both financial and academic independence as the 'new' universities in 1992. In a new institutional climate of cost effectiveness, government initiatives on mass education have drastically increased student numbers which has impacted on all disciplines, but more so on those that are skill based such as craft and design. This paper is based on the experience of teaching craft and design students at the University of Wolverhampton and new strategies developed to teach practical skills in a climate of vastly increased class sizes. Its focus is the areas of design and visual communication, and making, materials and processes. It evaluates both student and staff responses to the new programmes in these areas, in particular the relationship of teaching to independent study

The State of Church Planting in the United States: Research Overview and Qualitative Study of Primary Church Planting Entities

The launching of new Protestant churches in the United States, widely known as church planting, plays an increasing role in today\u27s ecclesiastical landscape. This article summarizes salient findings from existing literature (multiple church planting studies, 54 doctoral dissertations, 41 journal articles, and over 100 church planting books and manuals), giving particular attention to a 2007 study by Leadership Network, which itself involved fresh research among more than 200 church-planting churches, over 100 leaders from 40 denominations, 45 church planting networks, 84 organic church leaders, 12 nationally known experts, and 81 colleges and seminaries. The Leadership Network findings review the contributions and impact of four primary church-planting entities on the American churchplanting industry: denominations, church planting networks, church-planting churches, and house churches. The most important conclusions of the Leadership Network study report that around 68 percent of church plants still exist four years after having been started, and that the assessment, preparation, and coaching processes for the pastoral leader have a dramatic impact on both the well being of the planter and the vitality and survivability of the new church

The State of Church Planting in the United States: Research Overview and Qualitative Study of Primary Church Planting Entities

The launching of new Protestant churches in the United States, widely known as church planting, plays an increasing role in today\u27s ecclesiastical landscape. This article summarizes salient findings from existing literature (multiple church planting studies, 54 doctoral dissertations, 41 journal articles, and over 100 church planting books and manuals), giving particular attention to a 2007 study by Leadership Network, which itself involved fresh research among more than 200 church-planting churches, over 100 leaders from 40 denominations, 45 church planting networks, 84 organic church leaders, 12 nationally known experts, and 81 colleges and seminaries. The Leadership Network findings review the contributions and impact of four primary church-planting entities on the American churchplanting industry: denominations, church planting networks, church-planting churches, and house churches. The most important conclusions of the Leadership Network study report that around 68 percent of church plants still exist four years after having been started, and that the assessment, preparation, and coaching processes for the pastoral leader have a dramatic impact on both the well being of the planter and the vitality and survivability of the new church

Analogy Mining for Specific Design Needs

Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring specific aspects of a product-- for example, one designer might be interested in improving the brewing capability of an outdoor coffee maker, while another might wish to optimize for portability. In this paper we introduce a novel system for targeting analogical search for specific needs. Specifically, we contribute a novel analogical search engine for expressing and abstracting specific design needs that returns more distant yet relevant inspirations than alternate approaches