Construction of scale models in industrial design: the irruption of additive manufacturing. Rubrics proposal for an objective evaluation

Abstract

Recent studies corroborate the progressive implementation of Additive Manufacturing technologies (commonly known as 3D printing) in education, demonstrating several advantages. In the field of industrial design, the development of models during the design phase of product design helps designers in training to visualize their proposals. Today, 3D printing and traditional model-making techniques coexist in classrooms. With both techniques it is possible to achieve good results, but when it comes to evaluating them it is not so simple, since both ways of working are different and apparently the same evaluation criteria cannot be used in both cases, which could lead to comparative grievances.

This work presents a series of rubrics that can help to evaluate the student's models in an objective way and under equal conditions, independently of the technique used: traditional o 3D printing. In order to do this, we started from a rubric made to evaluate traditional models, which was tested during a couple of academic years in other subject. This rubric was adapted to create a new rubric, which allowed to evaluate models made by 3D printing, looking for equivalent criteria with the previous rubric to guarantee a fair evaluation of both ways of working.

The rubrics were tested experimentally in the subject ‘Prototypes: experimental workshop’, taught during the 4th year of the Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). Two groups of users assessed each work using these rubrics. The results showed, on the one hand, that both groups found it easy to evaluate the works using these rubrics, and on the other hand, that these rubrics allow for a fairly objective evaluation of the works, since the score obtained by both groups of users was very similar.