Teaching design skills to engineering students has long been one of the main building blocks of the bachelor curriculums at the TU Delft faculties of Industrial Design Engineering and Architecture & the Built Environment. We observe that our students achieve high-level (design) competencies during their study time at TU Delft. But we also observe that design education goes together too often with over-aroused students and ambitious teachers, leading too often to higher levels of student stress. With the support of the Dutch 4TU Centre for Engineering Education, we asked first-year bachelor IDE and ABE design students about their perceived levels of arousal and the factors within the design education learning environment, which contribute to a positive or negative study experience. This paper will show our understanding of our design education pedagogies, our model of spheres of influence, and potential coping strategies for students and tutors. We indicate five spheres of influence for our design students: the student self, design tutors, classmates, the learning environment, and society at large. Each sphere consists of various potentially stressful factors. The coping strategies we propose focus on helping students to find ways to become aware of their feelings and thoughts, the meaning they give to them, and the kinds of behaviors and (short-term and long-term) consequences which follow from there. We also emphasize the role of the community of teachers and students to help individual students assess those (potentially) stressful situations constructively@en

Over the last half century, design education has diversified and developed considerably, in part in the arts academies, and increasingly in universities and vocational technical education. The TU Delft design program was founded in 1969, and has since grown quickly into a large, university-based, technology-aligned set of programs presently housing 2000 students and 100 academic staff. In the 50 years the Delft program changed due to: (1) changes in societal demand (from products, via services, to the systemic level of societal challenges), (2) the maturing of design as an academic discipline between science and engineering, and (3) international developments of the educational system (e.g., the Bologna agreement). In this paper we describe the development of this program within the broader disciplinary context of TU Delft, and how it brought together engineering, social sciences, and business studies in project-based education. We draw lessons from a unique position, made possible by this large scale and positioning next to engineering sciences. This position supported a large pool of in-house expertise; it fostered an intertwining of education, research, and practices in the industrial and wider societal context. And it also posed challenges of making design education work at a large scale.

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