For the past 5 years, more and more established technological firms have structured domain of expertise dedicated to breakthrough innovation management, in order to foster their innovative capabilities. Our paper studies how such expertise may be organised to identify and exploit more effectively new design paths. Our case study is based on the Renault's experts who demonstrate how the design theories could support the firm's innovation capabilities through an exploration partnership. The conclusion presents new co-exploration models and proposes organisations of the expert's activities.

“C-K theory”, a theory of reasoning in design, offers a formal modelling language with the power to describe the unfolding of creativity and the generation of new innovative objects as integral parts of design practice. However, the theory has limited ability to analyze and describe the particulars of design practice when the target area is service. To address this question, the purpose of this paper is to refine the “C-K theory” by embedding service relevant constructs and exploring strategies for enhancing the creative engagement resulting in the innovative service concepts.

An important step when designers use machine learning models is annotating user generated content. In this study we investigate inter-rater reliability measures of qualitative annotations for supervised learning. We work with previously annotated product reviews from Amazon where phrases related to sustainability are highlighted. We measure inter-rater reliability of the annotations using four variations of Krippendorff's U-alpha. Based on the results we propose suggestions to designers on measuring reliability of qualitative annotations for machine learning datasets.

Many research students find challenges when validating their research. Especially when they have expectations to contribute to both practice and the research body of knowledge. This paper argues that a key to successful validation of design research lies in the ability to focus on what to validate in advance of how to validate. The paper provide a set of guidelines to support a discussion on how to converge to a claim that actually can be validated. The paper reports on experiences from PhD level course on validation in design research.

During engineering design, designers employ three types of model: physical, virtual and cognitive. The role and contribution of each is documented in literature albeit fragmented in nature. Consequentially, a gap in understanding exists in terms of how these models and the transitions between them impact the designer and design process. This paper begins to address this through a characterisation of each model class and an appraisal of the transitional pathways including their alignment to seminal design frameworks.

Hierarchies of knowledge represent a popular formalism for conceptualizing beliefs, justifications, and truth statements. To capitalize on the opportunity for formulating effective maps of design knowledge, this article introduces the hierarchical context–design development–high-level (CDH) model that stratifies different bodies of design-specific knowledge into ranked levels. We compare it with existing hierarchical models of knowledge, and describe its unique uses and benefits for both design research and design practice.

The requirements on validity for studies in design research are very high. Therefore, this paper aims at identifying challenges that occur when setting up studies and suggests solution strategies to address them. Three different institutes combining their experience discussed several studies in a workshop. Resulting main challenges are to find a suitable task, to operationalise the variables and to deal with a high analysis effort per participant. Automation in data evaluation and a detailed practical guideline on studies in design research are considered necessary.

The concept of involving user perspectives into product development processes has its roots in the early 1960s. Although this seems to be following a quite long tradition, as a design research field, it did not improve substantially and, so far, no consistent perception or even definition of the concept can be found. The paper points out where design research on user involvement still lacks methodological and theoretical foundation and makes the attempt of providing impulses for systemizing the existing body of knowledge within the Design Society as a research community.