Walk the talk or a design driven approach to design design education

The world is, at the moment, rapidly transforming and incites us to rethink and redesign society. Innovation itself is transforming, changing the way organisations and industry innovate and cooperate. Contemporary education in industrial engineering design needs to correspond to the industry and societal needs. This calls for new designers, which we call open innovators. This rapidly transforming world also involves its habitants. Current 18-year olds have grown up in a digital knowledge focused world. These new students have different needs and values. As teachers we are very aware of this transformation and explicitly looking for new ways to teach, tutor and challenge our students. In this paper we will describe the innovative way in which we designed a new international bachelor program Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) where designers from all over the world are educated to become such open innovators. We applied a design driven approach, consisting of four pillars (future driven, value driven, participative, and design thinking). We share our insights by explaining what and how we did, and why and how this could be interesting to translate to other programs or contexts.