This study examines how second-hand clothing (SHC) store design influences consumer perceptions and purchase behaviour. Based on findings from two studies (study 1: survey, n=268; study 2: experimental, n=90), design strategies were developed informed by Norman’s Emotional Design model. Results show that fresh and floral scents enhance hygiene perception and purchase intention, while attractive visual presentation improves purchase intention, willingness to pay, and quality and hygiene perceptions. While visceral design addresses some consumer concerns, strategies at all three levels are needed to fully improve the SHC shopping experience as they address consumer concerns, build trust, and encourage sustainable purchasing behaviour.

Traveling on and interacting with an autonomous bus confronts disabled passengers with a handful of different and unknown challenges in terms of accessibility. To address this, a user journey was developed that includes the challenges for disabled passengers when traveling and interacting with an autonomous bus. The user journey provides a chronological list of occurring challenges for passengers with a disability. With the help of three qualitative studies in which four bus operators, ten bus drivers and 25 disabled passengers participated, the challenges of the user journey could be identified and some important requirements for possible solutions could be determined. By identifying the challenges, solutions can now be developed so that disabled passengers can travel on an autonomous bus and therefore the accessibility of autonomous buses can be increased.

To address the evolving life-cycle needs of both the amputee and prosthesis, input from key stakeholder (amputees and family members, prosthetist, physiotherapist, and prosthesis technician) is essential. Collaborative decision-making is necessary for timely involvement in the design, redesign, and maintenance of prostheses. Our framework, adProLiSS, supports this process by integrating stakeholder knowledge and real-time data obtained from smart prosthetic devices. Through an Ontology-Driven Prosthesis-Service System Framework incorporating an Ontology-Driven Consequence Mapping Model, key decision makers can visualise the consequences of their choices, enhancing communication, alignment, and adaptability. This holistic, data-driven approach prioritises patient-centred care, advocating for a paradigm shift in healthcare design practices.

The complexity and dynamism of global markets is driving the manufacturing industry to evolve from product-based business models to solution providers by integrating smart services. This shift poses challenges, particularly for the organizational design of technical service organizations that deliver these services. Despite the growing importance of servitization, research on the organizational impact of smart services remains limited. Combining a systematic literature review and case study approach with expert interviews, this study examines how smart services affect organizational design of technical service organizations, in the following dimensions: structure, people, processes, and reward systems. The findings offer initial design approaches for manufacturers transitioning to smart service delivery and advance theoretical and practical insights in this field.

Despite the lightweighting benefts that hollow structures afford, current Generative Design (GD) tools are not capable of synthesising them by default. This paper proposes an approach to generate hollow structures using an off-the-shelf GD tool and an innovative shelling method. The approach is used to create solid and hollow variants of a load bearing component. These are modelled using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) then Additively Manufactured (AM) and characterised via destructive load testing. FEA results show that the shelled structures are up to 2.5 x stiffer than their solid counterparts however destructive testing revealed small stiffness losses attributable to the AM process. Despite the physical testing results the method offers the potential to apply GD tools to industries where hollow tubes are accepted practice, enabling part consolidation capabilities to be leveraged.

Design method validation is fundamental to ensure that design methods achieve their objectives in the intended situations and are accepted in practice. Although various method validation approaches have been developed, there is still a lack of practical guidance for planning validation studies based on project characteristics. To address this, an intensity map of the validation effort is presented as the core of a scenario-based planning approach. It categorizes projects according to the novelty of the method and the state of research on the problem or the research area, enabling the required validation studies, their sequence and validation criteria to be identified. Thereby, researchers can plan validation studies and estimate the required effort situation-based, allowing for a better alignment with their individual project characteristics before starting studies.

Philosophers have long discussed the virtues of scientific theory and the role they play in pursuing, preferring, or finally accepting a theory on the basis of internal criteria and experimental evidence. Based on two case studies from elementary particle physics, we propose a list of experimental virtues and discuss how they influence experimental strategies and whether a measurement is deemed conclusive—independently of its relation to theory.

United Nations peacekeeping seeks to protect civilians from violence in conflict. The UN’s ‘hard’ power, in the form of armed units, has been found to be effective in civilian protection. However, the UN also wields ‘soft’ power in various ways, including such aid investments as Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) that seek to meet local needs, build confidence in the operation, and foster support for peace. Yet, we know little about the effect of QIPs in supporting peacekeeping objectives. We argue that QIPs are unique, as they disincentivize rebel groups from engaging in plunder and strategic violence against civilians to acquire resource benefits. Further, QIPs incentivize rebels to reduce violence against civilians out of concern for losing civilian support. We therefore expect that QIPs should reduce rebel attacks on civilians. We test this hypothesis with disaggregated data on QIPs and rebel attacks on civilians in Africa. The findings support our expectations.

This novel contributions reveal how environmental regulations drive engineering design costs, focusing on the emblematic case of packaging. Using a regulatory database and simulation-based modeling, we evaluate functional expansion as a key driver of cost escalation, identifying its volume effect (rising costs from added environmental functions) and scope effect (increased interdependencies among ecosystem actors). The findings offer a simulated cost envelope to support engineering design teams in their forecasts, but also underscore the hurdles of sustainably managing these regulatory-driven costs in the packaging product system, by benchmarking cost trajectories against sustainability metrics, such as carbon pricing.

This paper presents and experimental study that compares the performance of teams of one, three, and six in terms of generation of requirements from given design prompts. Team size has not been fully explored in the literature in comparative experimental studies for requirements generation. The study was conducted with 116 teams of one, 86 teams of three, and 92 teams of six composed of pre-service engineers in an introductory engineering course. Two prompts were used for the in-class activity. Results indicate that the size of the team did not have significant influence on the number of requirements generated. However, this suggests that there is a difference in efficiency of generating requirements. Analyzing the variety, novelty, and completeness of the requirements generated is reserved for future work. This work helps to lay the foundation for justifying team size.

Many developments, such as the Amazon Fire Phone and Microsoft Zune, fail in the market, often due to addressing non-existent needs or providing no added value. Therefore, it is necessary to validate these needs and benefits in the early phases of development projects. One way to do this is by using a product profile that models needs and benefits and makes them accessible for validation. According to the literature, there are nine challenges and four fields of action for developing a design support in validating these product profiles. These fields of action range from stakeholder integration, method selection, and prototyping to the interpretation of results. This publication evaluates and describes the challenges and fields of action derived through expert interviews and literature research. A total of 28 publications were analyzed, and eight expert interviews were conducted.

This work is driven by the aim to minimize material waste in the production of structural sheet metal components. Thus, a rule-based decomposition process for multiply connected planar shapes is presented, analyzing the shape’s boundary and skeleton. Based on four cutting rules, shapes are decomposed to particularly extract straight and strut-like parts, allowing high packing densities for a reduction of material waste. Additionally, an alternative shape decomposition scenario is described, aiming for the avoidance of stress hotspots in structural components. In a case study with various shapes, effects on material waste are investigated involving a strip packing problem. Furthermore, effects on mechanical stress are analyzed. The results show potential to reduce material waste, but also disadvantages regarding mechanical stress. Aspects for further consideration are pointed out.

A systematic process was used to develop a complete taxonomy of visual representation mechanisms applicable to the display of any kind of engineering information. The resulting twelve categories are broadly divided into eight related to graphical elements treated individually and four related to the arrangement of two or more graphical elements treated in conjunction with each other. The taxonomy is oriented to inform the further development of user interface software frameworks supporting the automated display of interactive engineering information in any form.

The article analyses archival materials from the drafting of the UN Marriage Convention (1962) between 1949 and 1962. This Convention is usually understood as a human- and women’s rights Convention. The article expands this understanding by showing that the Convention was produced through a collaboration between the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the Trusteeship Council, Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, and metropolitan administrators of former colonies, then having the status of dependent territories. The treaty-makers focused exclusively on marriages in the dependencies but were in great doubt about the form and amount of force in these marriages. They, accordingly, were unsure how to measure such force. Nevertheless, they proceeded with the drafting, as their visions of free marriage and emancipated women were bolstered by their commitment to the ongoing economic transformation accompanying decolonization of the territories. The article shows how human rights of marriage thus emerged from ideas about economic development convoluted with ideas about marriages and women; and articulates this history’s theoretical implications for the rights’ applicability today. It also expands our understanding of international women’s rights as regulatory models, and of the post-colonial political economy of international law.

Today, Manufacturing companies are adopting a servitization strategy and Product-Service System model to enhance value and remain competitive. Often, this transition also means to embrace a System-of-Systems (SoS) perspective. Concurrently, companies face challenges with volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. One way to tackle VUCA is to utilize simulation modeling. However, developing SoS simulations can be complex and cumbersome. This paper extracts lessons learned from six case studies to identify effective and ineffective practices in developing simulation models. The analysis has led to nine design principles for more effective simulation modeling. Furthermore, the paper explores simulation techniques for modeling SoS and discusses effective VUCA management. Finally, the paper proposes four future research directions to advance SoS simulation research.

Understanding network influence and its determinants are key challenges in political science and network analysis. Traditional latent variable models position actors within a social space based on network dependencies but often do not elucidate the underlying factors driving these interactions. To overcome this limitation, we propose the social influence regression (SIR) model, an extension of vector autoregression tailored for relational data that incorporates exogenous covariates into the estimation of influence patterns. The SIR model captures influence dynamics via a pair of $n \times n$ matrices that quantify how the actions of one actor affect the future actions of another. This framework not only provides a statistical mechanism for explaining actor influence based on observable traits but also improves computational efficiency through an iterative block coordinate descent method. We showcase the SIR model’s capabilities by applying it to monthly conflict events between countries, using data from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). Our findings demonstrate the SIR model’s ability to elucidate complex influence patterns within networks by linking them to specific covariates. This paper’s main contributions are: (1) introducing a model that explains third-order dependencies through exogenous covariates and (2) offering an efficient estimation approach that scales effectively with large, complex networks.

This paper proposes a redefinition of interfaces as dynamic, adaptive systems crucial for managing the increasing complexity of modern systems. Drawing on diverse domains, the paper identifies key interface properties such as adaptability, cost-efficiency, and error response. The paper introduces a novel Generic Interface (GI) architecture, utilizing a model-based systems engineering approach. The GI architecture features modular components, designed to handle integration, data management, and error resolution. A case study of smart grids demonstrates the effectiveness of the GI architecture in addressing challenges like integrating diverse energy sources, ensuring grid reliability, and enabling demand response. The proposed GI architecture provides a robust framework for integrating complex systems, emphasizing adaptability, cost optimization, and error response.