Research on the composition of design graduate students’ academic competence from interdisciplinary perspective: take industrial design as an example

Chinese Industrial Design education focuses on the cultivation of design practice but neglects the training of academic writing, such as Literature reading, problem awareness and writing, etc., which leads to the weak academic capacity of industrial design graduate students. This study adopted semi-structured interviews and literature research to conduct qualitative research on the academic ability of Design graduate students based on grounded theory. Through telephone interviews with 9 graduate supervisors, data were collected, and then telephone recordings were converted into written materials. Nvivol2 software was used to code relevant concepts, and various indicators and elements of academic ability were extracted. This paper analyzed the components of academic competence in industrial design graduate students and established a structural model. According to the structural model, the similarities and differences between the academic ability of design postgraduates such as industrial design and those of liberal arts and engineering students are discussed, and the cultivation strategies of their academic ability are put forward.