Transferring Design Knowledge: Challenges and Opportunities

Design becomes more and more the art of bringing together expertise and experts from different domains in creating future products. Synthetical knowledge and hands-on skills in design, especially in industrial design, is often implicit, hardly captured and modeled for remote education. The need of transferring implicit design knowledge using computer mediated learning tools, provides not only technical challenges, but also many research opportunities. In this article the literature about training transfer and implicit design knowledge transfer is reviewed. A scenario of using such learning tools for learning and teaching physical modeling in industrial design is presented, followed by a discussion about the challenges and opportunities in developing such a system.