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Session 2360

Design Competitions An Avenue For International Exchange

Gary Crossman, Steve Wells, Michihiro Nishi Old Dominion University/Kyushu Institute of Technology

Introduction

Globalization of the world is taking place. U. S. companies are finding themselves needing to know more and more about other countries and businesses that reside there, whether, to be able to sell products, establish manufacturing facilities, collaborate with foreign companies, assess competition there or here or some other reason. It is reasonable to expect that many of these companies would be looking for college graduates, including engineers, with some sort of international exposure. Hence, many universities and colleges have developed and are developing methods to expose their students to international culture, business and engineering practices. Traditional methods involve exchanges of students and/or faculty between a U. S. institution and a foreign one. Types of exchange include: the exchange of graduate or undergraduate students with another institution for part of their education; the exchange of graduate students for research efforts; and, the exchange of faculty for purposes of research or teaching. Other methods involve the teaching of globalized culture, business and engineering courses at the U. S. institutions, and providing cooperative education opportunities for U. S. students with foreign based companies, both here and abroad.

For years, U. S. institutions have had a large contingent of foreign graduate students and now we are seeing more and more. These numbers far exceed the number of U. S. students going to a foreign institution for their education. This imbalance also exists in most student or faculty foreign exchange partnerships. Many countries have English as a strong second language, while the U. S. is primarily a one-language country. A university is much more apt to find more foreign students or faculty to come to the U. S. than their students or faculty who would feel comfortable learning or teaching in a foreign university. The exchange of students or faculty for collaborative research is also apt to be a little one-sided. It is because of this that Old Dominion University’s College of Engineering and Technology developed, with its sister institutions in Germany and Japan, a short term design competition that moves from institution to institution.

History

Old Dominion University is located in Norfolk, Virginia, home of the largest naval base on the east coast and the headquarters for NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). As many other U. S. cities have done, Norfolk has established “sister city” relationships with several cities abroad including Wilhelmshaven, Germany and Kitakyushu, Japan. The sister city relationship

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Grossman, G., & Wells, S., & Nishi, M. (1999, June), Design Competitions An Avenue For International Exchange Paper presented at 1999 Annual Conference, Charlotte, North Carolina. 10.18260/1-2--7547