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Rebound effects occur when sustainability interventions trigger behavioural or systemic responses that offset environmental benefits. This paper explores how designers encounter and seek to prevent them in practice, based on nine interviews with sustainability-oriented practitioners. We identify twelve challenges across micro, meso and macro levels, showing that effective prevention requires aligning behavioural literacy, organisational governance and structural incentives across design contexts.
This study investigates how clinicians and technicians describe the preparation and use of CAD models in collaborative design sessions for mass personalised products. Semi-structured interviews with ten professionals were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed three themes: the input data required before modelling, the additional information that supports interaction with the CAD model, and the role-specific ways in which contributors evaluate it. These insights guided the development of an initial parametric CAD model intended to support future collaborative work.
This study investigates the gap between objective and subjective garment quality and explores how insights from subjective quality can inform industry practices to enhance product longevity. Based on 16 interviews, findings reveal that consumers rely on subjective-intuitive aspects to form quality expectations and subjective-aligned aspects that emerge through experiences. Qualitative use emerges as a crucial connection between subjective and objective quality. These insights inform design strategies promoting garment longevity across three phases: design, primary retail, and secondary retail.
Early embodiment design requires sustainability considerations for design alternatives that traditional LCA techniques cannot efficiently support. This paper presents a fast parametric LCA model that expresses environmental impacts as linear functions of material mass, recycled content and recyclability potential, allowing rapid evaluation of design alternatives. Applied to load break switch drives of two generations, the model achieves a MAPE below 5% relative to conventional ISO-compliant LCA results and demonstrates its capability to support design space exploration.
Product configuration systems support customized design in complex engineering. However, as products grow in complexity, the configuration model also grows, making it important to manage these models effectively. Based on industrial case studies, This study shows how companies structure their configuration models and how modularization helps improve flexibility, maintainability, and scalability. The results provide empirical insights and practical guidance for structuring robust configuration models in complex engineering contexts.
The chapter ‘Digital Diplomats’ examines how smartphones have become indispensable to the everyday workings of Brussels’ political and diplomatic life. Drawing on ethnographic vignettes – from a diplomat’s panic at forgetting her phone to a trilogue meeting where multiple devices shape negotiations – the chapter argues that smartphones are not merely tools, but integral to the EU’s everyday governance. These devices function as shapeshifters: they are information portals, negotiation aids, social outlets and even diplomatic prostheses, extending the reach and capabilities of their users.
Inspired by the scholarship of Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, the chapter frames smartphones as central to the ‘diplomatic assemblage’ – a dynamic interplay of people, practices and technologies. The phone’s omnipresence transforms how work is done, from protocol staff using step-counters to assure delegates, to diplomats managing multiple conversations simultaneously. Yet, this dependency also introduces new vulnerabilities, as seen in rising cybersecurity threats and the institutional push to regulate device use.
Ultimately, the chapter reveals how digital technologies are redefining diplomatic bodies and practices, making the EU’s political life increasingly hybrid. To understand contemporary governance, we must recognise the smartphone not just as a tool, but as a constitutive element of the Brussels Bubble’s social and political fabric.
The Circular Life Cycle Blueprint (CLB) is a four-step design methodology for integrating circular economy principles at the component level in product design. Developed via a design science approach with iterative prototyping and evaluation, the CLB guides design teams from conceptualizing circular strategies to mapping component lifecycles and conducting a sustainability assessment. Pilot evaluation with industry professionals indicates that the CLB is effective and user-friendly, fostering innovative circular design and demonstrating practical viability in sustainable product development.
This study examines barriers for circular ecosystems in literature, and identifies 11 enabling factors for collaboration in circular ecosystems. Based on a web-based analysis of 763 European CE projects, the study analyses how factors are addressed in practice. Collaborative processes, trust building, and technological enablers were most frequent, supporting relational foundations via digital tools. Projects often signal collaboration but rarely detail governance or ecosystem orchestration. Findings highlight design capabilities to foster shared-value creation in circular ecosystems.
E-scooters have cemented their position as a convenient transport solution in urban areas, with hundreds of millions of e-scooter trips completed globally each year. This study investigates and presents useful tyre performance data for 12 e-scooter tyres, including three novel 3D printed tyres made from 90A TPU. The results highlight the potential of 3D printed tyres to provide comparable performance to existing e-scooter tyres. The information presented in this study is useful to better understand the energy losses associated with these devices.
Small and medium-sized enterprises often lack the time, expertise, and tools for effective scenario management. This paper proposes a modular, AI-enabled scenario architecture integrating a guided wizard and expert environment on a shared knowledge backbone. The design aims to reduce effort and tool fragmentation while preserving human judgment, structural quality, explainability, and traceability. The proposed pattern outlines a provenance-aware foresight pipeline with human-in-the-loop capabilities that aims to transform one-off projects into reusable organizational knowledge.
This article motivates the use of MBSE and SysML for organizational development and argues for a model-based integration of sustainable leadership (SL) into sustainable manufacturing (SM). We discuss whether modeling requirements resulting from SM and SL literature can be met by SysML and introduce an initial black box perspective and meta-model. The work is part of a larger research project aiming to transfer findings from SM and SL research into a model-based integrated SM in order to support a human-centered perspective. This work shows that SysML is suitable for organizational use cases.
Current funeral materials prioritise preservation over ecological integration, perpetuating extractive practices that damage environments while reinforcing cultural death denial. Extending the emerging trajectory of regenerative death care, this paper proposes regenerative biomaterials using post-mortem resource recovery via alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation). Effluent burial vessels and bone-ash tree guards demonstrate life-centred design methodologies, positioning soil ecosystems and native vegetation as design stakeholders. The research reveals how biomaterials designed for ecological wellbeing create regenerative infrastructure addressing both human grief and landscape healing needs. Biodesign materials are designed to nurture soil microbiomes and support native plant establishment over 24-month decomposition cycles to challenge industrial death care’s resistance to natural cycles. This work contributes a methodological deepening of regenerative death care beyond harm reduction, establishing methodologies for designing with more-than-human agencies through speculative material experimentation. The project reimagines death not as waste requiring disposal, but as a resource that contributes to ecosystem regeneration.
Human-Centered Design focuses on individuals who struggle to grasp the relational aspects crucial in designing for care. This proposes a relational framework that visualizes the relational expectation misalignments between stakeholders’ perceptions. We extend the Theory of Planned Behavior to model dyadic care relationships. Expert interviews and autoethnographic analysis evaluated the model. Our findings reveal two layers of misalignments: the model’s ability to describe the structure of conflict and its potential as a reflective tool for stakeholders to resolve conflicts.
Chatbot-based surveys offer low-burden, in-situ data collection, yet unconstrained LLMs often drift from research aims. We conducted 359 ultra-short, post-experience voice interviews in a public venue to compare a framework-guided LLM, an unconstrained LLM, and fixed questions. The guided approach produced significantly longer responses than fixed questions and yielded the richest diversity of process-specific accounts. These findings show that probe control is essential for eliciting actionable, experience-grounded feedback in real-world, time-limited settings.
Variant management faces increasing complexity that challenges traditional rule-based configuration approaches. This contribution explores how AI can support the generation of configuration rules (1) by comparing two solution concepts – a deterministic Python-based and an LLM-based approach. Following a structured early-stage AI system development methodology, the research investigates (2) how AI can be methodically integrated into variant management and (3) how implementation factors differ between both approaches. The results reveal distinct trade-offs between transparency and efficiency.
This paper proposes a methodical framework for developing functional surfaces and coatings for circular automotive applications. It addresses three gaps: the missing classification of surface mechanisms, limited empirical PSPP models, and the lack of an integrated link between microstructural surface design and system-level development. The framework connects top-down design with bottom-up materials engineering, introduces working-principle analogues in design catalogues, and offers the use of DoE and sensitivity analysis to build predictive PSPP models.
Custom manufacturers of engineered products face growing challenges in managing complex and variant Bills of Materials (BOMs). This paper proposes a visualization-driven framework for structuring and analyzing overcomplete (150%) BOMs in Engineer-to-Order environments. The framework integrates configurator rule logic, generic BOM structures, and metadata to enable explicit traceability and diagnostic analysis of variant-specific BOMs. A proof-of-concept prototype evaluated in a European fibre-laser manufacturer demonstrates support for variant validation, error detection, and alignment.