Artificial intelligence influences requirements engineering, but it remains unclear which activities benefit and how. This paper reviews 15 studies from the last five years, classifying AI approaches with an established RE framework. Current work focuses on operational tasks: requirements determination, analysis, consolidation, and traceability. About two thirds address single activities rather than integrated solutions. Early-phase tasks like knowledge elicitation receive little support despite being central to practice. The mapping clarifies existing AI support and gaps for future work.

Transdisciplinary (TD) engineering design is a useful approach for engineers when responding to the wicked problems of sustainability and systems transitions. A research gap lies in understanding the quality criteria for TD engineering design, and in investigating to what extent existing studies in the field exhibit TD qualities. In this semi-systematic literature review we develop a framework of quality criteria for TD engineering design and then analyse relevant literature using the framework. The paper concludes methodological recommendations for future TD engineering design studies.

This paper explored the Double Diamond design methodology through a low-reliance pacifier case study that reframes parents’ needs into a child-led weaning solution. The project integrates artistic design research with engineering design innovation methodology to create an unique aesthetic floral pacifier idea with functional forms. It was found that beyond academic theory, effective real-world design requires dedicated testing and refinement, positioning this work as a practice-led research approach that strengthens both process and outcome for a successful and modular design process.

In order to respond to today’s needs, engineers must be able to develop sustainable and environmentally compatible products and systems. To meet this requirement, new or adapted courses and curricula are needed in the field of engineering. This paper reviews the integration of a modular and scalable course concept for sustainable product development. The multi-institutional case study of 18 implementations across four German universities implies two primary models of use: stand-alone courses for specialisation and integrated modules for dissemination.

This paper provides a structured overview of methods for assessing assembly complexity in manufacturing. A systematic literature review classifies approaches as product-, information-, or system-centered, each reflecting distinct sources of complexity and application contexts. A four-dimensional scheme enables consistent comparison. The results highlight methodological gaps and support future development of scalable, integrable models for planning and decision-making in high-variety production environments.

Common ecodesign tools, such as LCA, remain challenging for designers, limiting their use in product design. At the interface between design and ecodesign, CAD-environmental assessment integration could be a solution. We aim to complement previous assessments of such tools, focused primarily on assessment capabilities, by proposing an evaluation framework based on common LCA limitations. Applied to three commercial CAD modules, it highlights differences in operational capabilities and limitations, providing a differentiated appreciation of CAD-integrated tools.

Political goals, emerging EU sustainability regulations, and industrial digitalization are driving the introduction of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) to enhance transparency, traceability, and compliance across product life cycles. However, the appropriate granularity of DPP integration across product architectures remains ambiguous. This paper introduces a structured, decision oriented framework that links product structure, regulatory relevance, and information depth to define consistent DPP levels, supporting both industry implementation and future standardization.

The framework proposed operationalized through four interrelated components: encoding, retrieval, mapping, and evaluation. Semantic networks serve as the underlying knowledge representation that enables information structuring and cross-domain association. By translating cognitive reasoning into a computational architecture, the proposed framework establishes a unified structure for supporting analogical design and provides theoretical and technical guidance for developing future semantic-network-based tools that more effectively facilitate creativity and innovation in conceptual design.

Daily stand-ups often deviate from their intended efficiency. This study shows that challenges like unequal participation, recurring blockers, and lack of goal orientation can be made visible through an AI-based analysis method. Validated in several iterations with real company data, the method provides transparent and data-protection-compliant results. By identifying specific improvement potentials, the approach creates a data-driven foundation for teams to optimize their meetings and their collaboration.

The choice of modular product structure strategies has far-reaching implications for development, production, and other aspects of the product life cycle. So far there is only limited methodological support for the decision process. This contribution proposes a conceptual impact model that illustrates the relationships between modular product strategies, induced effects, and resulting economic targets. The proposed impact model supports the decision making process in the early product development stage and serves as a basis for further methodological development.

This study explores how spatial and sensory design influence critique interactions. The “Room for Critique” prototype was developed through a research-through-design process grounded in neuroaesthetic research and evaluated across five PhD feedback sessions. Findings indicate that spatial layout and multisensory ambiance shape focus, perceived equality, and comfort. The paper introduces a dual framework of spatial neutrality and affective design and proposes six actionable guidelines for creating feedback environments that support calm, constructive, and balanced dialogue.

This paper explores how sustainability is integrated into technical courses across Danish design engineering programmes. It finds a gap between program goals and technical courses, where sustainability remains absent or at best implicit. Structural barriers like outdated materials and traditional teaching hinder integration. We propose three reforms: make sustainability an explicit learning objective, update teaching materials and use design-oriented examples and exercises. This will strengthen sustainable change an integral aspect of design engineers training.

This paper introduces negotiation games as a method for staging and structuring collaboration in sustainability-oriented engineering design. Building on the Staging Negotiation Spaces (SNS) framework, it shows how scenarios can be re-staged as rule-based artefacts that provoke dialogue and alignment across organisational roles. Drawing on a case in scenographic production, the study demonstrates how negotiation games enable stakeholders to surface divergent concerns, reframe challenges, and co-evolve problem and solution spaces through situated alignment.

Aligned with Industry 5.0’s human-centred and collaborative design vision, this paper examines how knowledge representation (KR) supports design communication through a dual-function lens, distinguishing knowledge transmission and knowledge generation. Based on a review of 83 studies, we map KR across stakeholder interactions and design stages. Transmission dominates early cross-stakeholder communication, while generation is largely confined to designer-centred ideation, revealing structural imbalances and opportunities for broader KR deployment.

Engineers simulate system behavior to support decisions in product engineering. Leveraging such engineering simulation data in strategic product planning can support idea generation and early evaluation of design alternatives and limitations. However, limited resources and expertise hinder broader uptake in strategic product planning. This paper investigates simulator integration into automated workflows and key processing components to enable simulation without in-depth expertise. This approach improves strategic product planning by creating data-based decision support.

This study modelled service dynamics, specifically focusing on cognitive misalignments among actors, and conducted a multi-agent simulation using Bayesian inference, referring to an improvisational dance experiment. The results revealed that individual cognition influences context convergence: “No decay” condition fixed initial biases and hindered convergence, whereas faster decay increased fluctuation but enabled reconfiguration, suggesting the need for unlearning. When actors weighted others’ expressions less, cognitive misalignments widened despite strong subjective conviction.

Cradle to Cradle (C2C), as an eco-effective approach to the circular economy, helps mitigate the environmental impacts of the linear economy; however, its implementation in product development remains challenging. Due to limited prior reviews, this research investigates the implementation of C2C in product development. Through a systematic literature analysis, we identify key topics and challenges and examine how eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness are addressed. Based on these findings, future research should develop a framework for implementing eco-effectiveness in product development.

Data-Driven Design (DDD) is emerging as a transformative approach in engineering design, leveraging AI tools to extract knowledge from design data that drive product development and innovation. While large language models have advanced DDD through the analysis of textual data, technical drawings remain largely unexplored. To address the limitations of current vision-language models, this study presents a novel object detection pipeline that automatically identifies components in patent images, enabling data-driven analysis of component geometries, interfaces, and spatial configurations.