Attitudes toward design and the formative background of domestic design-engineering interdisciplinary researchers

Background The increasing importance of the study of domestic convergence has promoted the linkage of programs between engineering and design. The object of this study is to understand the attitudes of researchers involved in design convergence and the design backgrounds concerned with the formative attitudes of researchers. Methods This study focused on literature research methods. The collected literature about convergence policy and study related to the design-engineering relation for recent 10 years were analyzed for research tendencies and characteristics. The attitudes of the researchers toward design were extracted through an analysis of the contents of the selected documents. Then, the background of the formative attitude of the researchers was analyzed based on the internal and external factors of the design territory. Results The contents of the documents selected in this study mainly focus on the review of the researches and policies related to the study of convergence, and the strategy. Most of the researchers have been perceiving design as an artistic tool of creative thinking. This recognition is based on the internal and external background of design territory such as the devaluation of designer's role due to the lack of understanding and recognition of design and absence of design value evaluation criteria. Conclusions Unbalanced dynamics between design and engineering have existed for a long time. And incomplete factors of he design system due to rapid changes of the social environment can be barriers to the development of design-engineering related programs and their synergistic effects.