Eco-innovation and advanced cad within an industry+academia+consultancy collaboration: An integrative id studio case study in the Australian context

This paper discusses an "industry+academia+consultancy" collaboration between Australian electric appliance manufacturer Breville, the 3 ^rd year industrial design studio of the University of Canberra (UC) and Eco-Innovators, an eco-design consultancy office. Initially, the paper describes the thinking and planning process for this studio, planned with the aim of fulfilling the diverse needs of academia, industry and the consultancy within a collaboration which should be beneficial for all stakeholders. Main aspects of this initial stage are course curriculum change, the selection of the projects and diverse evaluation criteria within the different aims of the three institutions. Subsequently, the unit outline, design brief and projects are briefly described. Afterwards, some concrete examples developed by the students are used to illustrate tangible outcomes of the collaboration. Finally, the paper evaluates the whole experience, highlighting aspects that worked as well as aspects that could be improved for the future, within the framework of action research in design education. Main conclusions of the paper describe the benefits for each of the stakeholders, which in summary were: 1) providing a broad array of innovative ideas for industry, 2) an integrated teaching of eco-innovation and advanced CAD within a real-life-project context for the design students, and 3) a trial test and evaluation of some of the educational material developed by the consultancy. This paper is useful for design educators, industry, consultancies and many of the diverse stakeholders related to new product design and innovation as it provides concrete example of possible collaborations between multiple institutions.