Keynote Speaker 1
| Session | Keynote 1 |
| Date | Wednesday, 16 July 2014 / 09:30 – 10:30 hrs |
| Topic | Training Future Engineers: What Can We Learn from Twelve Outstanding Innovators? |
| Presenter | Prof. Amaresh Chakrabarti, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore |
Biography
Amaresh Chakrabarti is a professor of Engineering Design at the Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He has BE in Mechanical Engineering from Univ. of Calcutta (now BESU), India, ME in Mechanical Design from IISc, and PhD in Engineering Design from University of Cambridge, UK. After PhD, he led for ten years the Design Synthesis team at the EPSRC Centre for Excellence Engineering Design Centre at University of Cambridge, before joining IISc as an Associate Professor. His interests are in design synthesis and creativity, biomimetics, eco-design and sustainability, product informatics, virtual reality, and design research methodology. He authored/edited 10 books, over 230 peer-reviewed articles, and has 6 patents granted/pending. He co-authored DRM, a methodology used widely as a framework for doing engineering design research. He is an Associate Editor, AI EDAM (CUP), Area Editor, Research in Engg Design (Springer), Regional Editor, J of Remanufacturing (Springer), and Advisory Editor for 7 International Journals incl. J of Engg Design (T&F), Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy (Springer), and Int J of Design Creativity and Innovation (T&F). Professor Chakrabarti has been elected twice to the Advisory Board of Design Society, UK, where he is currently a member of its Board of Management. He is a member of the CII National Committee on Design, India, member of the Jury for India Design Mark and India Design Excellence Awards of India Design Council. He founded IDeASLab - the first laboratory in India for research into design creativity, sustainability and innovation. He is Programme chair for International Conferences on Research into Design (ICoRD) and 22nd CIRP Design Conference (CIRP Design 2012), Conference Chair for 3rd International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2015) and vice-Chair for AI in Design (AID) and Design Computing and Cognition (DCC) Conferences. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineering Designers, the peer society under the UK Royal Charter in engineering design. Seven of his papers won top paper awards in various international conferences.
Abstract
A design is a plan for a system, its implementation and utilisation for attaining goals that are intended to change “current situations into preferred ones”. Designing involves developing both the goals and the plans for attaining them. In this sense, all human beings are designers. but not all are necessarily good at designing. A study was undertaken, into the lives and work of 12 outstanding engineers and innovators that spanned from antiquity to the modern times, to seek common, major influences on the success of these individuals. A major, persistent thread across these lives was found to be design-driven motivation that fuelled their life-long creativity and learning. The talk focuses on the relevance of this influence as well as the other influences as goals and enablers for creating the engineers of the future: how can we inculcate strong motivation in life-long learning? The talk will provide an overview of a Masters in design programme that has been running successfully at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for the last 15 years. Based on the personal experience of the speaker in teaching at this programme, as well as his experience of teaching and researching into engineering science and design at the Engineering Department of University of Cambridge, UK, a number of recommendations are made on the desired structure and content for a design and innovation-centred engineering education programme.
