Univerza v Ljubljani

The University of Ljubljana (UL) is the largest higher education and research institution in Slovenia with more than 40.000 students and more than 5.700 employees, of whom almost 4.000 work in research. The annual budget of the UL is about 287 million Euro. euros. In 2015, UL was involved in 196 long-term research programmes and an additional 440 research projects.

The faculty of Mechanical Engineering (UL-FME), as an autonomous teaching and research institution, consists of more than 320 employees (mostly academic staff) and is very active in national and international R&D and education programmes. It has been involved in more than 70 EU-funded projects in the last 5 years (H2020, FP7, CIP IEE, ERDF, Era- NET, Life, Erasmus+, LLL, ESA, Eureka, COST, etc.).

In this application, the Laboratory for Computer-Aided Design and Engineering (LECAD) of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at UL (UL-FME) will be involved in the project. LECAD is specialised in new product development, design methodology, advanced CAD solutions and supercomputing. LECAD (20 employees, 8 PhD students and a number of associative partners) has valuable know-how in the areas of Integrated Product Development and design, Kansei Engineering, Emotional Engineering, product data management and product life cycle management, various numerical flow analyses, advanced surface modelling, precise 3D surface measurements, development of special CAD solutions for industrial partners. Both UL-FME and LECAD have well-established connections to local and international main and niche industries such as Talum, Trimo, Domel, Kolektor Group, Bosch Household appliances, Yaskawa, Gorenje etc. as well as to the best technical universities and faculties in the region and worldwide.

One of the main objectives of UL-FME is the pursuit of excellence in educational, scientific and technical achievements. It also plays an active role in technical education, trying to raise awareness of the role of engineering not only at the university level, but also on a broader level, among primary and secondary school students and even in the public, through organised appearances in media reports, trade fair exhibitions and other information media.

Research and education in the field of new product development has been one of the cornerstones of the LECAD laboratory since its foundation in 1983. Over the last decade the laboratory (and also UL-FME) has responded to the increased complexity and necessary perfection of new products through research, study and education of additional knowledge, which is largely covered by the laboratory staff: Design methodology, high-performance computing, complex numerical simulations and even multidisciplinary studies, such as marketing or emotional engineering. For this reason, the Laboratory recruited PhD students and researchers and collaborated with experts from different professional backgrounds, such as physicists, marketing researchers and designers. In the 2001/2002 academic year, the Laboratory’s staff, together with TU Delft and EPFL Lausanne, initiated one of the first international one-semester courses (10ECTS) of new product development, called European Global Product Realisation (E-GPR), and is among the pioneers of online engineering courses. The course also attracted other academic partners: UNIZG-FSB, the City University of the London and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Since its inception, the entire educational process has been conducted in a virtual environment using ICT. It was one of the first courses of its kind and is the only one with a 15-year continuous tradition of product development with real industrial partners and more than 65 working prototypes produced so far.

Based on the formal collaboration and informal links between UL-FME and the partners involved in this project, we came up with the idea of bringing together our knowledge and experience from the past to share it with a wider HE community and help to take engineering studies in the EU to a new, higher level. UL-FME will take an active role in this project and will share its experience from various interdisciplinary and transnational study programmes that have been implemented in the past (e.g. E-GPR course 2001-2013, Erasmus IP 2013-2014 and Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Alliances 2014-2017).

The aim of UL-FME in this consortium is the coordination between the participating partners, the provision of complementary knowledge, their long experience with ICT teaching methods and the connexion to the Slovenian and EU industry.

especially the factors that influence the quality of the measurement with the laser triangulation scanner. He has worked on and conducted a number of research projects and engineering design education courses, mainly related to design and development of new products. In the International EGPR School, he has served for nine consecutive years as both mentor and organizer. During this time, he began to bring his experience with reverse engineering and laser measurement systems to the project and recognized the need for a systematic transfer of this very complex knowledge into practice, mainly through concrete projects and then through various forms of education and publications. He also worked on various industrial design and new product development projects. In recent years, he has also published several works on design and engineering education.

Assist. Dr. Vanja Cok holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She received her doctorate in 2015 at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Ljubljana. She is a teaching assistant and researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, LECAD laboratory. Her main research interests are Product Development processes, engineering design, Kansei engineering methodology, user experience, formal grammar, Cultural Differences in design, emotions and design, user-centred design. Another area of her work is 3D modeling (CAD).

Assist. Dr. Ivan Demšar works in the field of design and development technology and engineering, machines and devices. He leads exercises in 3D modeling topics, basics and procedures of design, technical design techniques, transport machines, intralogistics, etc. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in 2002. He received his doctorate from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Ljubljana in 2016. He participated in several development and research projects: development, analysis of the production of a prototype of a drilling device for precision drilling in remote controlled vacuum tanks (LOMAC), development of a safe and environmentally friendly agricultural tractor under restricted conditions, development and analysis of a pillar railing, EGPR International School, etc. He also leads the digitization and implementation of CAD design exercises into web-based platforms.