The Reflection of Experiential Knowledge Into Professional Practice: Case of Industrial Design Education

Industrial designers, perform as professionals in various disciplines unrelated to design as well as conventional professional practice. During several professional and non-professional occasions it has been observed that designers’ knowledge of problem solving, multi-directional thinking, inclination to team work shows up during everyday life and is used both in everyday situations and also in professional workflow. Industrial design knowledge, has a compound nature, with close contact with engineering, ergonomics, business, aesthetics, society, environment and culture. The aim of the study is to investigate how practitioners graduated from industrial design departments use design knowledge while performing outside orthodox industrial design fields. With this aim, first the nature of industrial design education and its contribution to the design students was examined through theories about the experiential and explicit knowledge of design education. To further discuss the arguments with practitioners’ experiences, an exploratory field research was conducted.