The Future of Engineering Design Education with Emerging AI Technology

Engineering design has transformed the world. Can you imagine our world without engineering design? Our clothing, our food, our housing, our transportation, our recreational goods, the internet and everything that we use could have been possible by engineering design. However, the Design Education has been lagging behind in America for a long time. In fact, our current deign education approaches to teaching our students are at least fifty years old. IC Engines (Internal Combustion Engines) and older technology are still being taught in our classrooms where the emerging technologies are not included in our design education. What is happening is that we are not creating industry-ready professional engineers anymore. They fit the traditional industry, but not the emerging industry which is far ahead of the academia. There is gap and we need to unskilled our workforce starting by educating our students about the new engineering design trends. The emerging industry involving renewable energy is now being incorporated into the design stream and the zero emission industry is growing rapidly. By 2035 California is going to ban or discourage sale of cars with IC engines. That means we will have fewer cars that run on fossil fuel on our highways than the present. That is a very short time from now, the industrial design community is preparing for that. Because of the zero emission engine requirement, vehicles are designed with electric motor engines rather than IC engines. Electric motors have gone from thousands of components to just twelve components compared to IC engines. The drive train of a Tesla motor has about 17 moving parts compared to 200 in a typical IC Engine. So, that has changed the machine design and it is not in our curriculum. Besides the electric motors there are numerous design trends that are not being taught or incorporated into our traditional textbooks. In fact, an average engineering text book was originally written in 1950's and there are no modern engineering design text books written and if there are, we don't use them in our design curriculum. So these are the problems facing engineering today and these problems become more complicated by the development of AI, Artificial Intelligence. I do not have to emphasize the impact AI will have on our students, it will in fact impact every aspect of our lives and it will certainly impact the design process and methodology. AI, Artificial Intelligence, is providing powerful tools but we do not teach these to our students; therefore, we need a reform in our design education. This paper critically examines the existing practices in teaching design in our classrooms and examine past pedagogical practices and assesses approaching trends accelerated by the presence of AI, Artificial Intelligence. Highlighting evidence from various sources a discussion will be initiated by requesting a panel among the invited professionals and experts in our Pacific South West region of the United States to closely look at how we can prepare ourselves to meet the new trends in technology and how it will affect Engineering Design Education.