In September 2009 the department of Engineering of Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands has started a pilot honours program for excellent engineering students called PRogram OUstanding Development (PROUD). Aim of this program is to give those engineering students, who have the ambition, the opportunity to work on extra profession related challenges in their study. By means of this PROUD program Fontys University of Applied Sciences is responding to the wishes of students for extra curricular activities and increasing need from the industry for excellent professionals with an extra level of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. In this paper the courses offered at the Engineering department of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences are discussed. Different study possibilities/routings for students were developed depending on earlier acquainted competences, adaptation abilities to our system (special possibilities for slow starters) and tracking and tracing by intensive study coaching. This resulted in an improvement of the yield of students to 74% of students started in 2008. After working successfully on reducing the drop out rate of our engineering students the department focused on possibilities for excellent students. The department started the PROUD pilot together with engaged engineering students. In 2008 engineering students have carried out a research among their fellow students, lecturers, other institutes [1] and industry. This resulted in a quite different approach of an honours program for the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. In the PROUD program the student is stimulated to personally shape his educational career and to explicitly work on developing his own competences. The PROUD excellent program starts after the first year and extends to at least 3 semesters in the following years. The student, guided by a supervisor and outside the regular study time, is working on building an excellent portfolio at the university as well as in industry. During this period the PROUD student will work in industry one day a week in average. This is on top of his bachelor educational program. The students will receive an excellent honours certificate together with their bachelor's degree at the end of the study to express their honourable work. Each year about 20 students apply for a place in PROUD but thus far only about 3-4 passed the first interview round. It turns out that student, university and industry are eager to participate in this PROUD program.
I am proud to present the preface I wrote for Silvio Lorusso’s book, which came out in November 2018, in Italian, published by Krisis Publishing in Brescia, Italy. Here is the link if you want to know more about this title and order it. This is critical design theory at its best–Made in Europe. The text is loosely based on earlier postings on his Entreprecariat blog, which is part of this website.
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These are hard days for companies: they have to survive in a market that has been hit by a financial crisis. Many countries in Europe have severe problems trying to overcome this financial crisis. The main remedy applied by governments is to cut back on expenditure, but on the other hand it is said that it is important for a country, and especially for companies, to invest in innovation. These innovations should lead to innovative products that will lead to profitability turnovers for these companies and, as a consequence, improve the economic conditions in a country. Universities provide students with engineering competences, like develop innovation, with which they can show a higher degree of ability to answer complex questions such as how to become players in the market again. Teaching students to become more innovative engineers, Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Department of Engineering, has designed a curriculum in which students are educated in the competence innovation. An important element in the process of teaching innovation to students is the approach of inquiring into possibilities of patents. In the second semester of the first year, students can decide to join an innovative project called: ‘The invention project’. The basis of this project is that students are given the opportunity to create their own invention and with their previously acquired knowledge and skills they design, calculate, prototype and present their invention. In a research project, the experiences of students in this Invention Project have been analysed. The goal of this study was to understand what the success factors are for such a project. The basis of this inquiry is a questionnaire to identify the opinions of students. The research was carried out in the spring semester of 2012. In total 31 students were involved in this research. The results show that there was a high degree of student satisfaction about the Invention Project focused on innovation development. Success factors for this project in the first year of the curriculum were seen: 1 to work on own inventions, 2 development of student’s perception of the total product creation process and 3 to make students see the relevance of contacts with real professionals from industry and from the patent office in their own project. Improvements can be made by: 1 helping students more during the creativity stage in the project and 2 to coach them more on the aspect of engineering a successful invention of which they can be proud. This Invention project is a interesting with which collaborations with other universities can be set up.
Wereldwijd is borstkanker de meest voorkomende kankersoort onder vrouwen (WHO, 2015). In Nederland wordt er jaarlijks bij gemiddeld 17.000 vrouwen borstkanker vastgesteld (Integraal Kankercentrum Nederland, 2017), leidend tot een behandeling of mastectomie (amputatie). Veel van de vrouwen met een mastectomie dragen een externe prothese. Per jaar komen er in Nederland 4.000 nieuwe draagsters bij, mondiaal zijn dit er 500.000 (Integraal Kankercentrum Nederland, 2014). De huidige markt van externe borstprotheses wordt gedomineerd door bedrijven die al decennialang externe silicone protheses op de markt brengen waarvan het product-design al die tijd niet wezenlijk is veranderd. Veel vrouwen zijn niet tevreden over deze verkrijgbare externe borstprotheses en de bijbehorende bustehouders vanwege hun slechte draagcomfort. Daarnaast heeft een onderzoek naar lichaamsintegriteit aangetoond, dat vrouwen die een borstamputatie hebben ondergaan zichzelf en hun ‘nieuwe’ lichaam hebben geaccepteerd (Slatman, 2012) en dus heel anders omgaan met prothese. Maar tegelijkertijd heerst er nog steeds een taboe over het dragen van een (externe) borstprothese. In ‘Proud Breast!’ doet het lectoraat Industrial Design van Saxion in samenwerking met Proud Breast en het Deventer ziekenhuis onderzoek naar het ontwerpen van een natuurlijke, duurzame en praktische externe borstprothese-oplossing voor vrouwen die een mastectomie hebben ondergaan. Deze (potentiële) oplossing(en) dient niet alleen een comfortabel alternatief voor de bestaande externe (silicone) borstprotheses. Met een hele nieuwe en innovatieve prothese-oplossing willen de partners een disruptie in de markt veroorzaken en een beweging in gang zetten dat het taboe over het dragen van een (externe) borstprothese doorbreekt. In het verlengde daarvan maken we een verkenning naar de vraag hoe de prothese (inclusief de prothese bustehouder) vervolgens in de markt gezet kan worden.
