This paper is a case report of why and how CDIO became a shared framework for Community Service Engineering (CSE) education. CSE can be defined as the engineering of products, product-service combinations or services that fulfill well-being and health needs in the social domain, specifically for vulnerable groups in society. The vulnerable groups in society are growing, while fewer people work in health care. Finding technical, interdisciplinary solutions for their unmet needs is the territory of the Community Service Engineer. These unmet needs arise in local niche markets as well as in the global community, which makes it an interesting area for innovation and collaboration in an international setting. Therefore, five universities from Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Sweden decided to work together as hubs in local innovation networks to create international innovation power. The aim of the project is to develop education on undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. The partners are not aiming at a joined degree or diploma, but offer a shared short track blended course (3EC), which each partner can supplement with their own courses or projects (up to 30EC). The blended curriculum in CSE is based on design thinking principles. Resources are shared and collaboration between students and staff is organized at different levels. CDIO was chosen as the common framework and the syllabus 2.0 was used as a blueprint for the CSE learning goals in each university. CSE projects are characterized by an interdisciplinary, human centered approach leading to inter-faculty collaboration. At the university of Porto, EUR-ACE was already used as the engineering education framework, so a translation table was used to facilitate common development. Even though Thomas More and KU Leuven are no CDIO partner, their choice for design thinking as the leading method in the post-Masters pilot course insured a good fit with the CDIO syllabus. At this point University West is applying for CDIO and they are yet to discover what the adaptation means for their programs and their emerging CSE initiatives. CDIO proved to fit well to in the authentic open innovation network context in which engineering students actively do CSE projects. CDIO became the common language and means to continuously improve the quality of the CSE curriculum.
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Agile software development has evolved into an increasingly mature software development approach and has been applied successfully in many software vendors’ development departments. In this position paper, we address the broader agile service development. Based on method engineering principles we define a framework that conceptualizes an operational way of working for the development of services, emphatically taking into account agility. As a first level of agility, the framework contains situational project factors that influence the choice of method fragments; secondly, increased agility is proposed by describing and operationalizing these method fragments not as imperative steps or activities, but instead by means of sets of minimally specified, declarative rules that determine the context and constraints within which goals are to be reached. This approach borrows concepts from rules management, organizational patterns, and game design theory. Keywordsmethod engineering–agile service development–business rules–business rules management–product management–game design
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Designers move more and more in the direction of Service Design, in which frequently a participatory or co-design approach is used to involve service providers in the design process. The designerprovider relationship in such Service Design processes differs in four aspects from traditional client-relationships: The relationship is 1) more dynamic and interactive, 2) based on collaboratively evolving ideas and ambitions, 3) focusing on the process of innovation, rather than on the outcome, and 4) frequently based on extrinsic motivation for innovation or on fuzzy starting points. Designers experience difficulties in persuading service providers of the importance of such a collaborative approach, while providers are not familiar with this kind of approach and their organizations are not ready for such a kind of collaboration. This paper positions designer-provider relationship in Service Design processes in literature and describes a research proposal for the development of an efficient and effective participatory design intervention that stimulates collaboration between designers and service providers.
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