• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.1 s.63
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• pp.151-162
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• 2006

Nowadays most business organizations wish to hire competent people who can do their own jobs efficiently right after their employment. The primary goal of this study is to focus on how we can train undergraduate students in academia-industry collaboration to satisfy this requirement. By making use of the funding from the Ministry of Education & Human Resources Development to support academia-industry collaboration program, we established an intramural company, Hankyong Design Company, and set up several studio courses for junior and senior students. To develop these courses efficiently for the first semester of 2005, studied both intramural and extramural environments of academia-industry collaboration and searched for good examples of them. Based on this investigation, I made some assumptions that how we can perform the academia-industry collaboration program for undergraduate students successfully. I chose several design tasks related to digital communications, and appointed WisePost Inc., an Internet communication service company for MSN Messenger, to be a collaborator. We made the 'Interactive Design' studio courses together and applied the courses to 20 juniors. At the end of the semester, we evaluated the works of the students, and selected and commercialized some excellent items among them. During the course work, I realized the fact that education programs in academia-industry collaboration is feasible for undergraduate students majoring in design. I understanded the overall merits and demerits of conventional studio and academia-industry collaboration courses. In addition, the results from the present study suggest that the role of professor in academia-industry collaboration program would be quite different from conventional studio courses.