Univerza v Ljubljani

The University of Ljubljana (UL) is the largest higher education and research institution in Slovenia with more than 40,000 students and more than 5,700 employees, almost 4,000 of whom work in research. UL’s annual budget is around 287 million euros. In 2020, UL’s Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (UL-FME) alone was involved in 50 international and 44 national research programs and another 163 industrial R&D projects. The Faculty of Mechanical Engineering is an autonomous teaching and research institution with more than 320 employees (mainly academic staff) and 1780 enrolled students. In this application, the Laboratory for Engineering Design (LECAD) of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at UL (UL-FME) will be involved in the project.

LECAD specializes in new product development, design methodology, advanced CAD solutions and supercomputing. LECAD (17 employees, 2 PhD students and several associated partners) has valuable expertise in integrated product development and design, Kansei engineering, emotional engineering, product data management and product life cycle management, data analysis, data-driven design, advanced surface modeling, precise 3D surface measurements, development of special CAD solutions for industrial partners. Both UL-FME and LECAD have well-established links with local and international major and niche industries such as Talum, Trimo, Domel, Kolektor Group, Bosch Home Appliances, Yaskawa, Gorenje, etc. as well as with the best technical universities and faculties in the region and worldwide. One of ULFME’s main objectives is to strive for excellence in education, science and technology. It also plays an active role in technical education and seeks to raise awareness of the role of engineering not only at the university level, but also at a broader level, among primary and secondary school students and even the public, through organized appearances in media reports, trade fair exhibitions and other information media. Research and education in the field of new product development has been one of the cornerstones of the LECAD laboratory since its foundation in 1983. Over the last ten years, the laboratory (and UL-FME) has responded to the increasing complexity and the need to perfect new products by researching, studying and training additional skills, most of which are covered by the laboratory’s staff: Design methodology, highperformance computing, complex numerical simulations and even multidisciplinary studies, such as marketing or emotional engineering. For this reason, the lab has recruited PhD students and researchers and collaborated with experts from different professional backgrounds, including physicists, mathematicians, marketing researchers and designers.

Already 23 years ago, in 2001/2002, together with TU Delft and EPFL Lausanne we initiated one of the first international one-semester courses in new product development, called European Global Product Realization (E-GPR). This course was the pioneer of online engineering courses. Later it attracted other academic partners: UNIZG-FSB, the City University of London and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Since its inception, the entire educational process has been conducted in a virtual environment using ICT. It was one of the first courses of its kind and the only one with a 20-year continuous tradition of product development with real industrial partners resulting in more than 65 working prototypes produced so far. Based on the formal collaboration and informal links between UL-FME and the partners involved in this project, we came up with the idea of bringing together our knowledge and experience from the past to share it with a wider HE community and help to expend the engineering knowledge and activities to a broader community within the EU. UL-FME decided to take an active role in this project and to share its experience from various interdisciplinary and transnational study programs that have been implemented in the past (e.g. E-GPR course 2001- 2013 and several Erasmus projects). In this project the UL-FME took the lead to explore the possibilities to open the new product development processes, which normally run closed inside the companies, or in best cases together with (and open to) only a narrow group of people at the academic partners to a broader number of students or even to a wider public members, which are not part of an organized consortium. The aim of UL-FME in this consortium is the coordination between the participating partners, the provision of complementary knowledge, their long experience with ICT teaching methods and the connection to the Slovenian and EU industry.

Key staff:

Assist. Prof. Dr. Nikola Vukašinović, is the teacher in LECAD Laboratory. He worked in various aspects of product development and conducted a number of research projects and engineering design education courses, mainly related to design and development of new products. Since the abovementioned EGPR Course, he has continuously served as both mentor and organizer. In that time, he began sharing his professional experience with participants in the project and recognized the need for a systematic transfer of this very complex knowledge into practice, mainly through concrete projects and then through various forms of education and publications. In recent years, he has also published several works on design and engineering education. His current teaching and research areas are primary new advances in CAD and new product development, focusing on implementing artificial intelligence and VR/AR technology into these two fields of engineering.

Vanja Cok completed her bachelor’s degree in industrial design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In 2015, she completed her PhD at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Ljubljana. She is a teaching assistant and researcher at University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, LECAD Laboratory. She teaches design methodology and CAD modeling. Her research focuses on product development processes, engineering design, Kansei engineering methodology, user experience, shape grammar, cultural differences in design, emotions and design, user-centered design and CAD modeling.