Why do all these industrial design students build wooden bikes as their senior projects? Why not just build a real, functional bike?

This is how universities are educating young industrial design engineers and how we get things like Whirlpool Duet washers and Kitchenaid dishwashers that cost $900 and break every third Tuesday.

Industrial design students are taught, or permitted, to build jackass wooden "art" bikes instead of designing real, functional, durable machines that actually work. Everyone fawns over their conceptual industrial designs and then they all get pissed off when the transmission in their Ford Focus doesn't shift. Gee, maybe a $70,000 education in industrial design should have taught how to build a valve body instead of a non functional art bicycle, ya think?