Teaching the user centred design approach in industrial engineering school: Application in design for trauma intervention
Résumé
Context Engineers in specific design situations, and especially in the medical domain, need to consider user requirement early in the design phase of a project. They need to learn how to translate the user needs to engineering requirements list, and to find out solutions which fit the medical usage environment. Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the pedagogic method used with the industrial engineering students to learn and apply the User Centred Design Methodology. Materials and methods Inspiring from the concept of user integration in the design process, we proposed a course of Design for healthcare for the master students in industrial engineering, University of Grenoble. In this course, student are supposed to follow a User Centred Design approach to understand medical user needs, then they should design a concept followed by a prototype and finally make their design artefact evaluated by their user in an emulation. To support this idea, an agreement has been made with two surgeons of the Hospital of Grenoble. After reviewing some theoretical issues in the course, two groups of students go to observe a common medical situation in the hospital. The observation would followed by some discussions in order to clarify the problem. In the next step, they create a usage scenario in which they decided to propose a new solution. The new solution passed through the idea and concept to a prototype. By the support of the university, each group has the possibility to make a physical prototype for the emulation. Results Anticipating the surgeon during the project provides the opportunity for engineering students to face the design problem from a rough explanation of user, and not from a defined requirement list. The User Centred Design methodology seems useful for education in the context of design for medical and surgical needs.