Teaching design skills to engineering students has long been one of the main building blocks of the bachelor curriculums at the TU Delft faculties of Industrial Design Engineering and Architecture & the Built Environment. We observe that our students achieve high-level (design) competencies during their study time at TU Delft. But we also observe that design education goes together too often with over-aroused students and ambitious teachers, leading too often to higher levels of student stress. With the support of the Dutch 4TU Centre for Engineering Education, we asked first-year bachelor IDE and ABE design students about their perceived levels of arousal and the factors within the design education learning environment, which contribute to a positive or negative study experience. This paper will show our understanding of our design education pedagogies, our model of spheres of influence, and potential coping strategies for students and tutors. We indicate five spheres of influence for our design students: the student self, design tutors, classmates, the learning environment, and society at large. Each sphere consists of various potentially stressful factors. The coping strategies we propose focus on helping students to find ways to become aware of their feelings and thoughts, the meaning they give to them, and the kinds of behaviors and (short-term and long-term) consequences which follow from there. We also emphasize the role of the community of teachers and students to help individual students assess those (potentially) stressful situations constructively.
