This study considers the 'three sub-abilities' that constitute the abstraction ability and focuses on drawing as an education for acquiring them. Focusing on the similarity between the process of drawing and the semiotic triangle, elucidating their relationship with the sub-abilities that constitute the abstraction ability, it devises a drawing education programme that focuses on 'observing' rather than 'drawing'. The drawing education programme formulated is implemented on 177 students, and the result is determined using tests that enable objective evaluation to prove the effectiveness of the program in helping students acquire the 'three sub-abilities' that constitute the abstraction ability.
The educational programme proposed in this research, which focuses on the universality of the effects of learning drawing, as well as the quantitative criteria for evaluating it, will contribute to familiarize practical education in the field of art to the general public.
]]>Designing for disability is a very specialised area as it requires interdisciplinary expertise, and designing assistive devices for children with communication disorder, is especially a challenge as these users are incapable of providing adequate and coherent feedback. With the adoption of participatory design approach, in collaboration with experts/professionals/educators, as pivotal stakeholders and a proxy for the end-users; a game-based, multi-sensory learning aid has been developed to train children on the concept of sense organs. Several concepts were generated and evaluated through special educator participation and based on a preliminary survey of external special educators as evaluators, the prototype was found to be suitable for the target user to enhance their communication skills. This paper captures a research through design perspective on the design of customisable solutions for beneficiary user groups, who are unable to offer feedback.
]]>Community-based disaster risk reduction is an effective approach for emergency management to address the needs of communities. This approach focuses on identifying the community-specific needs and context of emergency management in that area to develop technologies that help mitigate effects of disasters. The complex network of community, technology, and user motivation makes it challenging to understand how to encourage users to adopt preparation efforts, as opposed to reactive measures that have been shown to be less effective and can lead to inequitable results. To address this research gap, qualitative interviews were conducted with participants from one medium-sized midwestern city in the United States to understand how community members think about preparation and make decision about adopting preventative technologies. The results of the qualitative analysis reveal that there were 5 main themes that are important to consider when developing technologies for emergency preparedness; Importance of communication during emergencies, the role of technology in emergency management, unequal access to resources, reaction instead of preparation, and motivation to engage in community preparedness and response.
]]>There are innumerable design methods that exist across a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from engineering, to marketing, to psychology. However, the organic, multidisciplinary nature of methodological development in design leads to challenges in comparing or combining methods. Disciplinary perspectives can create conceptual 'boundaries' that may not align with the fluidity of the problems that designers may need to address. It is challenging to work between the boundaries of these design methods due to the unclear delimitation of exactly where and how methods may be integrated. Nomenclature is unstandardized and different terminologies may describe similar phenomena. To address this, a boundary object—the Actor-Abstraction matrix—is developed to recontextualize each of these divergent methods onto a common scale so they may be better understood in reference to their peers. A meta-analysis of four established design methods is performed to demonstrate the flexibility of this conceptual device. With this tool, existing design methods may be more easily examined to identify points of compatibility and gaps in their coverage, and could also serve as a powerful platform for the creation of new design methods in the future.
]]>The work introduced two novel multiscale multifunctional tire designs developed using the Domain Integrated Design (DID) method and modelled with the LatticeQuery geometric modelling software. Furthermore, this research validates the meta-level parameter “interaction area” proposed for selecting biological analogy in the DID method. These two use cases were simulated with Abaqus. The concepts covered in this work are an example of multi-functional design. The obtained results validate the meta-level parameter derived from the DID methodology.
]]>Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly seen as appealing tools to perform design tasks traditionally accomplished by human designers. In today's digital economy, industries aim to adopt these tools to improve the efficiency of their complex design processes. But how does one decide what parts of their existing design process should be automated and which automation/AI tool to implement? With these questions in mind, we present a case study highlighting a company's decision-making process in converting its existing designer-dependent design process to one supported by automation. In this case study, we observed the company's decisions in selecting and rejecting certain automation and AI methods before finalizing a heuristics-based automation method that proved highly efficient compared to the company's traditional human-driven design program. In addition, we present three key discussion points observed in this case study: (1) the importance of implementing the designer's heuristics in the automation framework, (2) the importance of a uniform and modular design automation framework, and (3) the challenges of implementing AI methods.
]]>Circular product design has been recognised in the academia as a foundational step for companies to make circular business models functional and viable. In this regards, it is vital to have a quick-and-easy practical toolkit providing diagnostics and specific guidelines on product design in terms of circularity performance. The present paper announces a Circular Product Design Toolkit (CPD Toolkit) under development now, which aims at enhancing the circularity potential of an existing product by redesign. The following objectives are addressed. First, a brief review of existing approaches in the field of product-level circularity metrics and also available circular product design tools to clarify their purpose and practical value is conducted. Second, the scientific approach to assess a product circularity performance, previously developed, as a methodological background of the CPD Toolkit is outlined. Third, the basic principles and building blocks of the CPD Toolkit are briefly set out with further discussion in terms of possible presentation of information block as actual product circularity dataset and guideline part dealing with specific instructions for a company on how to progress in the circularity of the product produced.
]]>Due to the increasing importance of advanced systems, whose development calls for interdisciplinary and integrative approaches, and fundamental changes in the work environment, leaders are required to have a wide range of competences. Therefore, the aim of this work is to identify competences of future leaders, that are specifically relevant in Advanced Systems Engineering (ASE). Thus, professional, social, methodological, and self competences developed by a literature review are validated through expert interviews and prioritized by a survey. The insights are then presented in a competence portfolio including 30 areas of competences. The portfolio consists of areas of competence that are either relevant in the context of ASE (e.g. intercultural and interdisciplinary competence), New Work (e.g. competence to empower employees) or are relevant to leaders in general. It was possible to add further aspects that are necessary in ASE to the aspects from the literature review. The experts interviewed emphasized various aspects of interdisciplinary work and made clear that in future, leaders should place their employees at the heart of their activities and empower them according to their strengths and weaknesses.
]]>Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are widely available and applied in a variety of design and engineering applications. MR prototypes capture the respective benefits of physical and digital prototypes by merging these domains saving the time and resources required to create them. This advantage is compelling in the context of design education where tight time and resource constraints exist. However, it is known that new digital prototyping tools can cause problems for students applying appropriate prototyping tools during practice-based studio design projects. Our paper contributes a systematic appraisal of MR prototyping's proposed dimensions value against constraints and issues in design studio education. This highlights MR Visualisation and Knowledge Management dimensions as most readily realised in education. Recommendations are then reflected on via an illustrative case study into the implementation of MR prototyping via these dimensions. Reflections corroborate the value proposition, but also highlight a need for further research exploring activities to scaffold MR prototyping to further support reflective design thinking.
]]>Team composition in Project Based Learning is the first task for the class and has a great impact on the learning experience. Anyway, little space is dedicated in literature about team composition, considering their personal inclinations towards design tasks.
For these reasons we propose a tool that aims to map the design skills of students to optimise team composition. The tool is based on a questionnaire grounded in the design theory and aims at measuring the willingness of students at performing certain design tasks. The results of the questionnaires are analysed using Principal Component Analysis to normalise each students’ answers to the whole class, and to show the distribution of students in the space of engineering design skills.
We present the design process of the tool, and a first experimentation on two classes of master's degree students in Management Engineering and Data Science, testing the tool on a total of 72 students. The results are promising and demonstrate the robusteness of the questionnaire and of the analytical method. Also, we propose next steps for our research activity, calling for other researchers to test our method in different contexts.
]]>The maker movement has garnered interest from many disparate fields, from engineering to business management, to behavioural science, to city planning. The reason for this interest no doubt stems from the promised potential of the maker movement to revolutionize not only product creation and manufacturing, but in extension the economy around it. This paper examines existing literature across disciplines for evidence of what the maker movement has achieved so far, with a focus on implications for the field of Industrial Design.
]]>Additive manufacturing methods present prospects for designed mechanical deformation via the integration of controlled anisotropic lattice structure forms. Their assimilation into a Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) process would create a novel framework for the design of compliant mechanisms (CM). The method uses lattice structures to replace rigid multi-part mechanisms, with integrated and controlled flexibility into a single, compact, and precise component. In recent years, a lot of research has gone into making algorithms that enable users to generate CMs for their designs. But by relying on algorithms to design solutions, are they neglecting to fully understand how these mechanisms work. This work undertakes the design and development of a novel DfAM Framework, that utilises controlled lattice structure deformations to create a standardised method of CM design. The authors have developed a method for this, whilst allowing users to tailor CMs to their design, by using a wide selection of pretested structures. Indicating suitable structures for their design using an integrated novel taxonomy. The framework is tested and developed using a series of case studies.
]]>Digital Twins are one of the most trending topics. However, there are still open issues in the development of Digital Twins. One of these impediments is formulating a clear and valid value proposition of a Digital Twin. Therefore, this paper presents a novel business modelling approach for Digital Twins. Based on a literature review and an academic case study, different business modelling approaches and techniques were systematically compared, selected and adjusted in order to develop a new framework suitable for describing the value of Digital Twins. It consists of 10 steps – (1) describe a basic development concept of the DT, (2) identify the customer segments, needs and pain points, (3) derive a value proposition (4) identify revenue streams and values created, (5) identify key activities, (6) resources needed, and (7) necessary partners. (8) Adapt the organization to fit the business model and (9) evaluate the cost structure of the project. In the end, document and communicate the new business model (10). Each step is supported by auxiliary methods, tools and procedures. The approach was applied to a scientific case study. In an initial evaluation the overall applicability and usefulness of the approach were confirmed.
]]>The Life Cycle Assessment is a well-stated methodology whose application has recently spread over a multitude of sectors. Thus the need for very accurate and reliable analysis. The present work investigates how to achieve reliable and faithful results while still maintaining a micro-systemic approach and how to handle the evolution of the real cases through commercial solutions available. The works present an innovative dynamic approach that aims at filling the discrepancy between the attributional Life Cycle Assessment which is focused on the product at the point to appear short-sighted and isolated from the surrounding evolving system and the consequential, which is willing to include the consequences of the evolution of the surrounding system, with increased complexity. The approach is applied to the case of a domestic refrigerator; the application reveals a discrepancy of 16% between the results of the dynamic and attributional analysis and registered doubled environmental impacts than the consequential, carried out with the support of commercial datasets. The approach respects the 5 main criteria for methods in environmental systems analysis, namely feasibility, accuracy, easiness in communication, inspiration, robustness.
]]>When integrating sensing machine elements for in-situ measurements in technical systems, special attention must be paid to uncertainty to ensure the reliability of the provided information. Therefore, a methodical framework for the identification, analysis and consideration of uncertainty was already developed in prior research, which still offers room for improvement regarding the included methods and tools. Therefore, in this contribution, the initially proposed methods and tools are adapted and extended to enhance their efficiency and applicability and to reduce their error proneness in order to increase the acceptance of the framework in practice. First, the identification of uncertainty is improved by means of an extended effect graph for an automated identification of disturbance factor induced data and model uncertainty. Second, the significance of the subsequent evaluation of uncertainty is enhanced by replacing the initially proposed local sensitivity analysis with a global sensitivity analysis. Finally, a flowchart is proposed that supports the identification of applicable and promising strategies for the development of measures to consider critical disturbance factor induced uncertainty.
]]>Ad-hoc systems are socio-technical systems emerging in response to dynamic problematic situations. These systems form when situation systems interact with respondent systems organized by human agents using elements available in the situation and assets brought in from outside the situation. The immediacy of formation, fast evolution, and short lifecycles of ad-hoc systems intertwine design, implementation, and operation activities in complex ways not addressed by current approaches to Systems Engineering focusing on more sedate environments. The proposed framework presents a language for classifying fundamental building blocks of ad-hoc systems – single-agent intervention, staging, readiness, and development systems. Further classification according to the physical location of agents and assets relative to situations generates 16 system classes on the 4x4 matrix of Ad-hoc Systems Gameboard, which is a helpful tool for managing the evolution of system portfolios. Combining the Gameboard with mapping the systems onto the PSI matrix reveals additional relationships and evolution patterns, opening up promising directions to address the challenge of designing, planning, and implementing interventions in complex situations.
]]>Data about customer experiences would be critical in smart product-service systems. Research is desired on how to establish a framework for Smart Experience Design based on customer experience data so that determining what kinds of customer data are needed and how these data are acquired effectively can be supported. This paper presents a framework and a method to design customer experience personalization services based on customer experience evaluation data obtained in real time and accumulated together with context data. Two illustrative cases are provided to demonstrate the validity of the framework of smart experience design based on customer experience data.
]]>Mental imagery is the experience of perceiving an object within one's own mind and is a subjective experience, leading to difficulties in the research and understanding of the phenomenon. This paper documents the development and verification of a framework for researching the elements of mental imagery. The framework was developed following a review of both psychology and design literature which signified three fundamental conceptual viewpoints of mental imagery: imagery modalities, dimensions of imagery ability, and imagery processes. The aim of this framework is to allow for structured research on mental imagery in any given research field. This is verified through discussion for the product design engineering discipline and provides a base for future work on this topic. The conclusions made in this paper reveal that mental imagery, and particularly visual mental imagery, is largely considered to be integral in design overlooking the different realities of designers and confirming a greater need to understand mental imagery experiences in product design engineering.
]]>Today's global context of mass-produced items has resulted in an increasing ‘distance’, or alienation, between people and the origins of the items they buy and use: an unhealthy human-product relationship.
This observation permits the search for an alternative interpretation of well-being: a transformation that would support resilience and self sufficiency, and a better human product relationship or ‘a new partnership’, as advocated by various scholars.
In this paper, this new partnership is considered through supporting ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) product design: a scenario in which professional designers facilitate laypersons to design for themselves. Anticipating (1) the designer's responsibility, and (2) the layperson's innate desire to create, this paper introduces a ‘Design for DIY’ framework method to help bridge the knowledge gap between the product designer and the layperson.
The initial starting points of this study, complemented by a range of ‘Design for DIY’ studies, and an exploration of existing design frameworks and design models, resulted in the design of a ‘Design-for-DIY’ framework. This paper concludes with recommendations for the testing and further development of the Design-for-DIY framework.
]]>Our society is built on engineered systems. Engineers are becoming increasingly concerned with the sustainability of systems, particularly their ability to adapt to a changing world. Recently, there has been increased interest in exploring how design margins provide opportunities for a system change. There have been great developments in determining how design margins can absorb change at a system level, but it is still not clear how design margins might provide change opportunities at a decision variable level. In this paper, we show how system-level margins could be deconstructed to explore what change opportunities they may provide at a decision variable level. We also investigate how the coupling of functional requirements limits how system-level margins can be operationalized. Our analysis suggests that design margins can provide meaningful change opportunities at the decision variable level, but the mechanisms that produce these opportunities are complex. These insights lay the groundwork for future research on mapping and representing design margins in the context of system adaptability.
]]>Machine Learning (ML) techniques are showing increasing use and value in the engineering sector. Object Detection methods, by which an ML system identifies objects from an image presented to it, have demonstrated promise for search and retrieval and synchronised physical/digital version control, amongst many applications.
However, accuracy of detection often decreases as the number of objects considered by the system increases which, combined with very high training times and computational overhead, makes widespread use infeasible.
This work presents a hierarchical ML workflow that leverages the pre-existing taxonometric structures of engineering components and abundant digital models (CAD) to streamline training and increase accuracy. With a two-layer structure, the approach demonstrates potential to increase accuracy to >90%, with potential time savings of 75% and greatly increased flexibility and expandability.
While further refinement is required to increase robustness of detection and investigate scalability, the approach shows significant promise to increase feasibility of Object Detection techniques in engineering.
]]>The paper proposes a methodology for developing an active learning module adapted from the Kansei Engineering methodology that intends to engage and familiarize middle school students with basics of product design and the Kansei product design and culture, and develop design skills. The module includes an identification of the design elements of a selected product, the creation of an items/categories matrix, product clustering according to different criteria (shape, material, principle of operation), an analysis of product functions and main product characteristics, and an evaluation of products with a Kansei scale created by the students. This series of activities lead to a design-thinking-based product-design project culminating in the construction and evaluation of prototypes. It carefully considers how students can gradually learn by going from activity to activity leading to a design project. In doing so, important skills such as, among others, analytical thinking, divergent thinking, and critical thinking are intended to be practiced.
]]>Representation of design information using causal ontologies is very effective for creative ideation in product design. Hence researchers created databases with models of engineering and biological systems using causal ontologies. Manually building many models using technical documents requires significant effort by specialists. Researchers worked on the automatic extraction of design information leveraging the computational techniques of Machine Learning. But these methods are data intensive, have manual touch points and have not yet reported the end-to-end performance of the process. In this paper, we present the results of a new method inspired by the cognitive process followed by specialists. This method uses the Knowledge Graph with Rule based reasoning for information extraction for the SAPPhIRE causality model from natural language texts. Unlike the supervised learning methods, this new method does not require data intensive modelling. We report the performance of the end-to-end information extraction process, which is found to be a promising alternative.
]]>Bio-inspired design (BID) involves generating innovative ideas for engineering design by drawing inspiration from natural biological phenomena and systems, using a form of design-by-analogy. Despite its many successes, BID approaches encounter research challenges including unstructured data and existing models that hinder comprehension and processing, limited focus on finding biological knowledge compared to defined problems, and insufficient guidance of the ideation process with algorithms. This paper proposes a knowledge-based approach to address the challenges. The approach involves transforming unstructured data into structured knowledge, including information about natural sources, their benefits, and applications. The structured knowledge is then used to construct a semantic network, enabling designers to retrieve information for BID in two ways. Furthermore, a three-step ideation method is developed to encourage divergent thinking and explore additional potential solutions by drawing inspiration and utilizing knowledge. The knowledge-based BID approach is implemented as a tool and design cases are conducted to illustrate the process of applying this tool for BID.
]]>Providing the correct destination at the end of the product's use phase is essential for value recovery and to reduce the environmental impact at this lifecycle stage. To understand the e-waste recycling behavior among users, this article aims to identify the most common destinations given to smartphones when they are no longer used. A systematic literature review was carried out, and 13 studies were selected for a meta-analysis. The variable is the selection of the most common destinations for e-waste: reuse and recycling (recovered value), storage and informal collection (missed value), and household waste (destroyed value). The results present a summarized measure with the combined proportion of the studies for each category. Studies were weighted by the precision of confidence interval estimates presented in Forest Plots. The main results point out common problems and demonstrate how the strategies and policies adopted in each country can influence the chosen methods of disposal. These specificities require unique strategies to deal with local problems. As a secondary contribution, this study proposes guidelines to reduce e-waste generation and to create awareness and infrastructure to increase value recovery.
]]>Among the topics of psychological ownership (PO) within current literature, a significant gap exists in understanding PO within a prescriptive lens. This study will examine how instigating the PO mapping method will help us understand how the PO mapping method can support an ownership journey. In addition, we want to see how we can create a prescriptive ownership structure that one follows rather than using the tool as a descriptive method. To do this we will follow a Research Through Design methodology and test the PO mapping method in an organisational case study. We believe that the PO mapping method can help frame and guide organisational project handovers. We want to examine the factors that influence the parties (project teams) emergence and relinquishment of ownership, and how that affects the feeling of ownership of a project over time. Based on this understanding we will derive prescriptive phases to integrate into our PO mapping method. Thus this study demonstrates how the PO mapping method can be used in different contexts to support and provide prescriptive guidance for ownership journeys.
]]>Improvements in product development can increase the competitiveness of firms. However, new product development in CAD systems involves difficulties and uncertainties that increase along with the pressure to develop the products. A distinct characteristic of CAD modeling for new product development is its uncertainty. This is because the information is usually approximate and incomplete during CAD modeling. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to propose a robust and flexible CAD approach to reduce uncertainty and accelerate new product modeling in the context of design for manufacturing. This methodology permits the convergence towards different product forms depending on the selected manufacturing process. Application of this approach has shown that when uncertainty is high, approving a complete CAD modeling results in a delay in product development. In contrast, CAD modeling using fuzzy models results in a gain of valuable development time because the model is completed when knowledge about manufacturing technologies, company fit and capabilities, and markets is available.
]]>The production preparation process (3P) enables collaboration between design and production engineers during product development but its efficiency is limited by the abundance of documentation of manufacturing constraints and capabilities. Empirical studies showed that use of production requirements can increase the efficiency of 3P, however, the support for production engineers to capture and share production requirements is scarce. A method to support production engineers in identifying, defining, structuring and sharing production requirements and collaborating with design engineers is presented. The method has three major parts - focus areas and requirement categories, a worksheet for production requirements capturing and prioritization, and a workflow for using the worksheet. The method was developed in collaboration with practitioners and contributes to the existing knowledge by providing production engineers with a structured way of working with production requirements. Evaluation of the method in the case company showed its usability when developing product variants and that additional work is needed to support the development of new product families and assembly lines.
]]>The product engineering process as part of the product life cycle includes product and production system development as well as production. In integrated product and production engineering (PPE), knowledge transfer is an important success factor. Optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge transfers can, for example, support the avoidance of costly, production-related changes to the product design. The current state of research describes different models of knowledge transfer as well as factors that influence it. Some results show how the speed and quality of knowledge transfer can be improved by implementing so-called interventions. However, those models either represent abstract contexts of knowledge transfer or focus only on product engineering. Therefore, a literature analysis is conducted to identify the system of objectives for a method, that supports the improvement of knowledge transfer in PPE. Subsequently, the system of objectives is operationalized to provide the basis for the InKTI – Interdepartmental Knowledge Transfer Improvement Method, which is applicable, supports the user in improving knowledge transfers in PPE, and aims to increase the quality and speed of knowledge transfers.
]]>The part build orientation is a manufacturing variable that must be considered when designing a product to maximise AM opportunities. There are several approaches to selecting the best print direction in the scientific literature by considering different criteria. However, most of the studies are focused on specific AM technologies. It is missing a general method that evaluates a widespread number of criteria. Furthermore, such approaches expect designers establish weights for technical criteria that are too specific, especially during the preliminary design steps. Designers are familiar with criteria like cost-effectiveness, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength.
The paper presents a multi-criteria decision-making approach to optimise the build part orientation in additive manufacturing. The method considers five decision-making criteria (cost-effectiveness, rapidity, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength) and seventeen specific technical criteria. TOPSIS is the method used to optimise the build part orientation. A case study of three components exemplifies the five steps of the procedure.
]]>As the demands for new complex products/services increase, leading to strict constraints on budget and time-to-market, it is hard to learn from experience and improve practice. Improvement can be exercised in all aspects contributing to project management: the skill set of project personnel, the project structure, and the development process. People are the key asset of the project. Identifying the key participants in a project whose role is influential is important for improving the project's success. These people can receive support, remove their burdens, make sure their communication channels work well, etc. This paper offers a multilayer network-based method to examine an actor's influence in a project while combining two additional organizational key aspects: products and processes. Considering these three aspects together allows for a more informed evaluation of the actors' influence on the project. Using the insight from graph theory, we gain indicators related to each network actor. The influence of the actors in a multidimensional network makes it possible to present a clearer picture to decision-makers in the organization to make better decisions related to increasing the effectiveness of the development project.
]]>Social innovations in the energy sector (SIE) are essential for accelerating the transition to clean, renewable, and democratic energy while encouraging citizens' involvement. However, SIE lacks clear boundaries, making it challenging to make design decisions. Clear and effective design decisions can help identify opportunities and constraints that may impact the success of social innovations. To support decision-making in SIE design, this paper proposes a multi-objective decision-support model based on the definition and exploration of the SIE design space. The model integrates various objective functions related to economic, environmental, and social perspectives, to ensure that selected solutions are tailored to the needs of citizens. By exploring the SIE design space, the model allows designers to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of different design options and select the most suitable solutions. To illustrate the proposed approach, this paper applies the model to a specific case of SIE: photovoltaic self-consumption. The findings of this paper provide a decision support model to assist SIE designers in making informed design decisions.
]]>With increasing life expectancy, the risk of diseases of the central nervous system, such as cancer, strokes, etc., also increases. Strokes often result in injury to the sciatic nerve, which is responsible for controlling the calf muscles (plantar and dorsal flexors). A so-called ankle joint orthosis (AFO) helps to support the pathological gait and to avoid foot drop during gait. Passive orthoses are of particular importance for research, as they do not require additional incoming energy from outside to the orthotic system. However, current passive orthoses are often not personalized. On the one hand, because they usually have only a temporary muscle-building function and, on the other hand, because the individual design process is computationally time consuming and thus expensive. This paper presents a possibility to pre-dimension and pre-design passive orthoses fast and cost-efficiently by reducing the complexity of the model based on volume-optimized truss elements. Therefor a traditional high calculation intensive design procedure is compared with the complexity reduced model to show its effectiviness and the similarity of the results.
]]>Motor disorders are diseases affecting the muscle function of the human body. A frequently occurring motor disorder affects the lower leg muscles resulting in a pathological gait called foot drop. Patients have a higher risk of stumbling and falling. The most common treatment is the use of a passive ankle-foot-orthosis (AFO). However, the compensation of foot drop is only limited due to the non possible support of all rotational directions of the ankle joint. Therefore, a newly developed concept for a passive AFO is currently in work. To ensure a best possible treatment of the patient, the provided support by the AFO and required support by the patient have to be in accordance. Thus, in this contribution a method is presented that integrates model order reduced finite element analysis for computing the provided support of the AFO and musculoskeletal human models for representing the patients' gait behaviour. With the method, the design of the force generating structures of the AFO can be realized regarding the patients' requirements. The presented method is further evaluated with a specific use case. The main focus lies here in the principal functionality of the method and the provision of valid results.
]]>System maps are established tools in design practice and education as well as non-design research, both as a process and an outcome of systemic analysis and synthesis. Applying causal loop diagrams (CLD's) in (systemic) design research could be of great value to tackle the growing societal complexity. At this moment there is, however, no clear research protocol to include the rich data necessary for systemic research and ensure a scientifically valid system map in the context of design research. In this paper, we propose a protocol using CLD's as a research method and outcome in design-inclusive research. The protocol synthesises rich data from qualitative research in a way that the representation yields higher validity compared to the regular approach to systems mapping, using a process of reflection and iteration on boundary setting. An iterative process of qualitative research methods with lean validation methods was used to come to a conceptual proposal. The protocol can support systemic design researchers and practitioners to include a scientifically grounded CLD in the explorative research actions phase, thus bridging the research towards a phase of creative design actions.
]]>Home hand rehabilitation for stroke is becoming increasingly important due to logistic and financial challenges. Developing Daily-life Integrated Hand-rehabilitation Products (DIHP) aims to enable the application of at-home rehabilitation. The materials of these products are essential for their success, however, selecting materials for DIHP has not been investigated yet. Previous research on material selection showed that it is done strictly on material properties or based on a human-centered approach. Hence, in this study, we propose a hybrid model for choosing materials for DIHP. To achieve this, we first combined the findings of previous material selection processes into a comprehensive material selection model. We applied this model in a case study, in which we first selected three materials based on their properties. Following, we 3d printed a DIHP out of the chosen materials and tested the feeling of the materials with multiple expert groups. Our findings suggest that the proposed material selection method is promising and highlights that our comprehensive model provides more insights when compared to a strict material property-based selection.
]]>The product development process faces several challenges, such as an increasing and differentiated number of customer requirements, increasing product complexity, and shortened time-to-market. To address these challenges, the implementation of automation approaches in form of machine learning (ML) algorithms appears promising. However, companies lack the implementation of these approaches in their processes, inter alia due to inadequate knowledge and experience in this field. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop a structured formulized way of characterising ML algorithms, which can support non-experts in identifying the optimal algorithm to solve a given problem. First, existing approaches covering the determination of appropriate ML algorithms for a given task are examined. Based on this, a pattern language approach is introduced to characterise ML algorithms and problems, allowing matching to be performed to identify the most suitable one for a given task. Due to their broad application, the concept is demonstrated by creating patterns for decision trees and artificial neural networks. A study is conducted to prove that the proposed concept is appropriate to support the ML algorithm selection.
]]>Work-integrated learning (WIL) – a pedagogy that integrates academic studies with workplace experiences – presents an excellent opportunity for students to “deliberately practice” their design skills. To date there has been little investigation into the effect(s) of WIL experiences on developing novice designers’ design skills.
We performed a series of longitudinal interview case studies following three engineering students through the course of a 4-month work term. Interviews were semi-structured to gather rich contextual descriptions of participant experiences designing in WIL settings. Transcripts were analysed using an iterative thematic analysis approach.
Results indicate specific areas where WIL helps develop novice designers’ engineering design skills and mindsets beyond their early experiences in the engineering classroom. These include their experiences interacting with clients/users, the importance of project transition considerations, resource coordination, teamwork/collaboration, and the design process. We discuss how the structure of design tasks and their environment differ from the classroom experience, highlighting how WIL can supplement traditional design education.
]]>Real vehicle usage rarely matches the predictions made during early phases of vehicle development and sales processes at commercial road vehicle manufacturers. The automotive industry needs multidisciplinary vehicle design methods to predict real-world vehicle operations by considering the vehicle level and the transport system level simultaneously, in a more holistic approach. The aim of this study was to analyse how realistic vehicle usage of driverless multipurpose vehicles can be modelled in Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) by conducting a systematic literature review. We found that real vehicle usage modelling of driverless multipurpose vehicles in VRPs mainly depended on the following elements: VRP variant, energy consumption model, energy consumption rate class, number of vehicle-specific design variables and transport system-level factors. Furthermore, we identified in the literature five classes of energy consumption rate edge behaviour in VRPs. These findings can support decision-making in the modelling process to select the most suitable combination of elements, and their level of detail for the overall modelling aim and purpose.
]]>Stakeholder perspective taking is a critical skill in early-stage problem exploration and framing. We examined stakeholder perspective taking within an early-stage design team of engineers at NASA to begin to understand in what ways and under what conditions designers adopt stakeholder perspectives in the context of professional engineering organizations. Our findings identify a spectrum of perspective taking during problem framing deliberations that ranges from (1) fully taking the stakeholder's point of view (POV), (2) interpreting the stakeholder's POV using the designer's POV, (3) implanting the stakeholder's POV into the designer's POV, to (4) fully taking the designer's own POV. We also identify and describe conditions that appeared to encourage or hinder perspective taking in this setting. These findings are significant because they suggest ways to gauge and encourage the skill of stakeholder perspective taking among professional engineers working on real-world design challenges with societal implications.
]]>The early-stage engineering design activities include conceptualising, identifying, and solving an engineering design problem. These activities are essential and standard roles of a design engineer. However, they seem to lack comprehensive practice within the engineering design community. In this study, semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 participants having engineering design backgrounds are presented. The aim of the interviews is to investigate the awareness and practice of the early stage engineering design activities. The participants interviewed practice in countries including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Contrary to standard expectations, the results of the interviews show that the early-stage engineering design activities are not comprehensively practised. The results suggest that design engineers' crucial role in identifying unknown problems lacks practice. Also, the data from the interviews provide empirical evidence on the determinants for the lack of comprehensive practice of early-stage engineering design activities. Recommendations on possible interventions to support the practice are presented to expedite innovations and inventions.
]]>Academic institutions are increasingly required to prepare future practitioners to face complex sustainability challenges. The need to foster the development of different skills, attitudes, and multidisciplinary collaboration raised the interest in alternative learning approaches. Game-based learning can be a tool to achieve a variety of desirable learning outcomes, including sustainability and collaborative attitudes change. We present a pilot study investigating the potential of a board game on sustainability risks and opportunities in product development and life cycle, performing a test with different student audiences. The paper discusses our results of the experiment, including a survey following the game, qualitative analysis of students' feedback, and observations during the game sessions. Additionally, we relate insights from students' reflections to CDIO learning objectives. We then illustrate lessons learned and the potential advantages of using the game compared to other teaching approaches and as a complementary tool. Finally, we propose future directions and recommendations for the use of the board game and game-based learning in sustainability education with different student audiences.
]]>Simulation is fundamental to many engineering design processes and powers the field of computational design. Simulation inherently consumes energy resulting in CO2 emissions that impact our environment. While one can source energy from renewable sources and use energy efficient hardware, efforts need to also be made in how we can use simulation in a sustainable manner.
This paper presents a sustainable simulation framework that borrows concepts from web services. The framework makes it easy for engineering firms to adopt and embed sustainable simulation practices thereby removing the burden from the designer tin thinking about how to design sustainably. An illustrative example reveals a 25% reduction in computational effort can be achieved by adopting the framework.
]]>Autonomous vehicle solutions (AVS) are regarded as a major enabling technology to support the realization of 'total site solutions' in the construction equipment industry. Their full-scale deployment is hindered today by the need to test autonomous driving capabilities against the varying conditions an AVS is expected to be exposed to during its lifetime. Therefore, using virtual simulation environments is common to overcome the cost and time limitations of physical testing. A caveat in this virtual verification and validation (V&V) work is how to trade off the ‘realism’ of the V&V output (using high-fidelity models across many scenarios) against computational time. This research investigates expectations and needs for value-driven decision support in the virtual V&V process, proposing an approach and a tool to raise awareness among decision-makers about the value associated with using selected simulation models/components in the virtual verification and validation task for AVS. Verification activities performed on the initial prototype show that its main benefit lies in facilitating cross-domain negotiations and knowledge sharing when negotiating the desired features of the virtual simulation environment.
]]>Renewable energy is increasingly used and promoted. In the UK, for example, large scale renewable energy farms have been used to supply electricity with great effect. Given the large number of homes, there is considerable impact to be made by small scale residential renewable energy systems. Despite solar panels being the most common form of residential renewable energy technology, only 4% of buildings in the UK support solar technology of any kind. For direct electricity generation, silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) arrays are the most utilised, and when used in a residential setting, they are typically mounted on the sloped roofs. This is where the problem lies. The technology comes with a high cost, and there is further financial burden of installation and maintenance, making solar energy inaccessible for many UK homeowners. This paper presents a research and design innovation project to make PV technology more accessible in the UK. Edge Solar, the innovative, affordable, new PV system concept for UK homes may become a promising solution to significantly improve the accessibility to the PV technology and renewable energy at the household level in the UK and beyond with further development and commercialisation.
]]>Engineering design is typically a collaborative process, and in the era of digital engineering, online collaboration platforms are increasingly being used to perform the work. Despite the development of e-collaboration technologies, there is a significant gap between actual collaboration and what is really needed. However, improving collaboration requires a proper measurement system. Yet, the common methods to measure and improve collaboration are challenging, usually not compatible with digitalized collaboration, and have limited scalability. This paper presents a new data-driven method for measuring, visualizing, and monitoring Active Engagement (AE) in web-based teamwork, which is a key element of effective collaboration. We applied the method in a case study of four engineering teams during a Technology Planning and Road-mapping course. The results suggest that measuring AE in web-based teams, with an available history log, is technically feasible and can meaningfully represent the team's collaboration. The presented approach can be used to upgrade e-collaboration platforms as a toolkit or for further investigation on improving web-based collaborative design and learning through monitoring dashboards and feedback systems.
]]>Sustainability and circular economy are currently some of the strongest trends in industry as well as in politics. They are seen as the best chance to tackle emissions, pollution and climate change while maintaining the prosperity of society. Product-Service System (PSS) business models are seen as an enabler of the circular economy. However, the development of such business models is a major challenge, especially for SMEs. Therefore, there is a need for support through a methodical approach in the development and decision-making. This paper combines and extends an existing approach for assessing the feasibility of PSS-driven business models and a decision-support matrix for recirculation strategies to provide support to practitioners in the early development phases of circular PSS business models. The existing approach for feasibility analysis was focused on PSS only. To include the perspective of circularity and sustainability a systematic literature review was conducted to identify necessary criteria. Combined with the decision-support matrix the improved method aims to be a lean method to support feasibility analysis and decision-making in circular PSS business model development.
]]>Scaled agile development of large systems has primarily followed the approach used in traditional systems engineering – system decomposition and static teams assigned to subsystems. However, this arrangement may result in an inefficient allocation of resources and uneven progress. This paper presents an alternative approach in which problem-based decomposition replaces system-architecture-based decomposition, and resources are flexibly allocated to problems for each sprint using ad hoc teams. Using a field study approach, we examine a mechatronic system development project utilizing these agile adjustments and discuss situations in which these methods may be successfully utilized in other projects and organizations.
]]>Sustainability in engineering sciences is of rapidly growing importance. However, its integration into engineering education is still in its infancy. This paper is based on the finding that, in addition to conventional cognitive learning outcomes, affective outcomes like mindset and attitude play a major role in teaching sustainability effectively. We present the didactical theory behind this and the evaluation of two university courses which serve as practical examples and research objects. These course puts high importance on affective learning outcomes, teaching not only design and assessment methods but also encourages students to reflect sustainability goals in broader contexts. We describe the theoretical course design following the principle of constructive alignment and conducted a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the learning outcomes. The evaluation results confirm the importance of affective learning goals but also point out the need for further improvements to the course, which were implemented and re-evaluated.
]]>With the increasing implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the design process, it is crucial to understand how users will accept AI-designed products. This work studies how the public currently perceives an AI's design capability as compared to a human designer's capability by conducting an online survey of 205 people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The survey collects the respondents' perception on 16 specific bicycle design goals, demographic information, and self-reported level of design and AI/ML knowledge. Findings reveal that people think an AI would perform worse than a human designer on most design goals, particularly the goals that are user-dependent. This work also shows that the higher people's self-reported level of knowledge in design and the older they are, the more likely they are to think an AI's design capability would exceed a human designer's capability. The insights from this work add to the understanding of user acceptance of AI-designed products, as well as human designers' acceptance of AI input in human-AI teams.
]]>Engineering design in new product development is a constant battle between creativity and strict structure. As researchers look to optimize the process, each stage is placed under a microscope to put designers in the best position to develop better products for companies in a cost effective manner. One idea in improving product development is the concept of incorporating the Human-centered Design into functional analysis. However, critiques of these functional analysis methods cite an unnecessary amount of resources needed to invest in these steps, a restriction in creativity, and a high necessary level of effort from the design teams. The goal of this research will be to address these critiques by incorporating theories from cognitive research and Human-centered Design into the functional analysis process. This work will propose a new method aimed to improve the quality of the function model of the design space, increase the creativity freedom of the designers, and be accessible to engineering students and industry engineers alike.
]]>The variation management and product quality processes are important tasks to guarantee the assemblability of the systems, the scrap reduction and to avoid delays on production and launching. The compound of activities in Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) are necessary, especially in the early design stages, to take into account variations of different nature and from different sources. In this paper, an approach for considering the loading conditions in a polyhedral-based approach in tolerancing design is presented. The load boundary conditions are represented as additional displacement restrictions in the deviation space. The restrictions imposed by the physical limits of a system, the ones coming from the loading conditions and the degrees of freedom (DoF) can be all described and represented with a single polyhedron operand. The approach is illustrated using a simplified 2-D model for both ideal and non-ideal geometry. A 3-D model describing an unilateral contact is presented as a case study using Skin Model Shapes. By taking into account geometrical form defects, external loads, and the kinematics of the system, its sensitivity to variations can be reduced even from early design stages.
]]>This study aims at revising the history of knowledge management in service design organizations to discover what sources, technologies, tools, and users have been used and how knowledge management may thus help to improve consultants’ performance. Also, this study sheds light on the importance of decomposing knowledge (knowledge-leveling being said in this article) before tackling knowledge management. Moreover, this study provides a real case study investigation of knowledge management in a service design organization. Through this investigation, the authors propose their knowledge-leveling classification model and how knowledge management activities satisfy each class. Thus, the authors showcase the essentiality of knowledge leveling in knowledge management.
]]>Crowdfunding is becoming increasingly popular for funding projects, particularly in the domain of product design, by asking a large group of people. Previous studies have indicated that creativity plays a significant role in product design and is considered an important factor of success for new product design and development. However, these studies have not explicitly explored the role of creativity in crowdfunding product design projects. This paper investigates this issue by conducting a case study employing expert evaluations of selected successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding product design project samples. The results of the study show there is a positive relationship between the creativity of a product and the success of its crowdfunding campaign. Therefore, creativity can be considered a success factor of crowdfunding. The study also suggests creative products, especially useful ones, might have more potential to attract people's willingness to fund them. This paper has contributed to the research on design, creativity, product design and development, and funding business models. Most importantly, this paper has raised the significance of creativity in design and business.
]]>The word “Design” is used in many ways. But most of them consider it from the standpoint of artificial or man-made. In other words, as “Human Intelligence”, But we should remember we are born to “Design”. That is “Instinct”. We are born with instinct to survive. “Instint” is “Natural Intelligence”. “Instinct” plays an important role for making decisions. In decision making, we need to prioritze them. If the first one fails to satisfy our expectation, we take the next one. But our world is increasing complexity and complicatedness, and our bodies and movements are different from person to person. To cope with such increasing diversification, “Instinct” is calling for support. Therefore,Mahalanobis Distance-Pattern (MDP) approach is proposed in this paper as one of the tools to support our “Instinct”. MDP combines ordinal Mahalanobis Distance and pattern which is a non-verbal communication tool.
]]>Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from vessels is one of the greatest challenges the maritime industry is currently facing. International Maritime Organization has set the goal of reducing CO2 emissions from international shipping by at least 40% by 2030, compared to 2008. Emissions regulations are also leading to a progressive reduction of ships life span, together with a decrease in economic value. To cope with these challenges, the preferred strategy suggested by IMO for new vessels -Energy Efficiency Design Index- aims at increasing the energy efficiency over time by stimulating innovation and continuous development of technical elements. In this context, ship builders are indirectly led to develop vessels that will be “changeable” in terms of propulsion systems over time. This paper presents a conceptual framework to maritime vessels for propulsion system changeability, which integrates contributions from literature review with the knowledge of design thinking experts and precious insights of maritime industry professionals. The aim of this framework is support the integration of renewable fuel sources for vessel propulsion systems through an extended value approach, while improving propulsion efficiency over time.
]]>Objective To analyze and discuss the application of synaesthesia theory in modern product design and emphasize the important position and necessity of synaesthesia in modern product design. Methods Based on the concept of synesthesia, the value, significance and design principles of synesthesia in modern product design were further analyzed and summarized through the study of concrete examples of shape, color, material and using methods. Conclusion When the concept of synesthesia is applied to product design, it can enhance the expressive force of products, realize users' synesthetic perception, mobilize users' senses to give psychological suggestions, meet users' various psychological needs, and bring users a richer physical and mental experience.
]]>The application of agile development methods in response to increasing market dynamics and product complexity is a key lever in the automotive industry. Agile methods originally come from the software industry and enable fast, flexible and customer-oriented product development. These methods are also increasingly being used in hardware development. However, the evaluation of the benefits of agile methods in the context of automotive development has been primarily subjective. The publication aims to present a first data-based approach to objectify the benefits of agile methods in automotive development by highlighting the effects in the quality of collaboration within teams. A standardised procedure is therefore designed and presented. On the one hand, a model for measuring the agile maturity of teams is described. On the other hand, the quality of collaboration within a team is examined in different aspects using standardised key performance indicators. Based on the proposed procedure, a strong positive correlation was found between the considered key performance indicators of the quality of collaboration and the agile maturity of the development teams within the investigated organisation.
]]>Water scarcity and resource depletion can be expected during the climate crisis. Therefore, thermally loaded processes in particular, must be made more efficient in the future. Heat exchangers will play a key role in this optimization process. More efficient designs allow a greater heat flow to be removed from processes while mass flows remain constant. In this context, the heat-transferring wall of heat exchangers is a focus of current research on the design of heat exchangers. The aim is to increase the heat-transferring surface of the wall as much as possible and to keep the design space as compact as possible. Therefore, this study investigates the suitability of the differential-growth method for generating complex heat-transferring walls for heat exchangers using CFD-analysis. Firstly, a framework for generating the wall structures and a computational model for predicting the design influence of such structures for the thermal and fluid-dynamic behavior of the heat exchanger are presented. Thereby, the potential of such wall structures is analyzed in this study. Furthermore, the study identified weaknesses of such walls designed with the differential-growth method, which should be the focus of future investigations.
]]>This research aims to investigate the incorporation of anamorphism into product design and has resulted in the creation of a series of handheld objects with embedded anamorphic information. Anamorphism is a phenomenon typically applied to images, where it appears distorted from all but one angle. Often associated with optical illusions, its history and viability for application to product design are reviewed. This includes an assessment of different designs’ impact on the overall recognition of hidden anamorphic objects, focusing on their design attributes to determine the best at concealment. With the creation of 3D anamorphic objects, experiments were conducted to allow correlations between object visibility and design features to be identified. Analysis of the results showed that objects with vertically stretched text and wider cuts within the characters were hardest to recognise and therefore more secure. Objects with the least material made it more difficult to interpret the hidden information from positions that were not the “privileged viewing zone”. The creation of these anamorphic objects highlighted that this function of anamorphism is possible and could be incorporated within products in future.
]]>The practice-led research focuses on how agro-waste can be used to build a structure, gather relevant knowledge, and identify its various challenges. Based on the compressive strength of Bio-Bricks, it was decided to use a frame structure, and instead of using Bio-Bricks as a modular unit, the material used was cast in situ with the help of a specially designed mould. The roofing of the structure was also built using Bio-Bricks material over an MS frame. The prototype was plastered with cement mortar and finished with two coats of distemper paint. After the completion of the prototype structure, comprehensive documentation was done to analyse the data generated from the process to identify the desired improvements. A secondary study of sustainable building materials was done to understand the comparative strength and weaknesses of Bio-Bricks as construction materials. Based on the work done at different stages of construction, detailed lists of findings and inferences were drawn to improve the overall manufacturing process. The research project findings will help guide the future development of Bio-Bricks as a commercial building material.
]]>Manufacturing process (MP) selection systems require a large amount of labelled data, typically not provided as design outputs. This issue is made more severe with the continuous development of Additive Manufacturing systems, which can be increasingly used to substitute traditional manufacturing technologies. The objective of this paper is to investigate the application of image processing for classifying MPs in an unsupervised approach. To this scope, k-means and hierarchical clustering algorithms are applied to an unlabelled image dataset. The input dataset is constructed from freely accessible web databases and consists of twenty randomly selected CAD models and corresponding images of machine elements: 35% additively manufactured parts and 65% manufactured with traditional manufacturing technologies. The input images are pre-processed to have the same colour and size. The k-means and hierarchical clustering algorithms reported 65% and 60% accuracy, respectively. The algorithms show comparable performance, however, the k-means algorithm failed to predict the correct subdivisions. The research shows promising potential for MP classification and image processing applications.
]]>What do common devices such as smartphones, CD’s and solar panels all have in common? They are all examples of innovative technology that is still limited to flat, rigid geometries. This is primarily due to the limitations of the manufacturing processes used to create components within these devices, key among them the thin polymer films produced through spin coating.
Spin coating is a technique used due to its ability to effectively create uniform films on the scale of micro or nanometres. However, it relies on a planar substrate to produce uniform layers, thus restricting the design of components manufactured using this process to simple, flat objects. As the requirement for curved device geometries expands, complex alternative fabrication methods are being implemented in industry.
For spin coating to remain relevant, a viable process for controlling the fluid flow over curved surfaces must be developed. This research investigates the hypothesis that coating distributions can be controlled through optimized rotation of a curved substrate. Where a multi-axis rotational manipulator and novel characterization system have been developed to investigate the fabrication of curved devices using the improved spin coating technique.
]]>Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown stupendous power in generating realistic images to an extend that human eyes are not capable of recognizing them as synthesized. State-of-the-art GAN models are capable of generating realistic and high-quality images, which promise unprecedented opportunities for generating design concepts. Yet, the preliminary experiments reported in this paper shed light on a fundamental limitation of GANs for generative design: lack of novelty and diversity in generated samples. This article conducts a generative design study on a large-scale sneaker dataset based on StyleGAN, a state-of-the-art GAN architecture, to advance the understanding of the performance of these generative models in generating novel and diverse samples (i.e., sneaker images). The findings reveal that although StyleGAN can generate samples with quality and realism, the generated and style-mixed samples highly resemble the training dataset (i.e., existing sneakers). This article aims to provide future research directions and insights for the engineering design community to further realize the untapped potentials of GANs for generative design.
]]>Due to the continuous progress in information technology, complex problems of machine elements can be investigated using numerical methods. The focus of these investigations and optimizations often aims to reduce the stresses that occur or to increase the forces and torques that can be transmitted. Interference fit connections are an essential machine element for drive technology applications and are characterized by their economical fabrication. The transmission of external loads over a large contact surface between the shaft and hub makes it less vulnerable to impact loads. These advantages contrast with disadvantages such as the limited transmittable power, the risk of friction fatigue, and stress peaks at the hub edges, which can lead to undesirable and sudden failure, especially in the case of brittle hub materials. Analytical approaches already exist for optimizing these connections, which are expensive, time-consuming, and complex, so a high degree of expert knowledge is required to apply these methods in practice successfully. This paper presents a novel method using the example of optimizing the pressure distribution in the interface of a shrink-fit connection.
]]>One difficulty with sketching pedagogy is the tendency to assess growth according to outcomes, as opposed to processes. We assessed eye gaze patterns between advanced and intermediate design sketchers and anticipated correlations between eye-gaze practices and sketching proficiency. Participants sketched two different objects using analogue materials, a potted plant from memory, and a MacBook from observation.
The study utilised Tobii 3 adjustable eye-tracking glasses and Tobii Pro data processing software. Twenty-five design sketching students and six design sketching instructors participated in the study.
Metrics measured include the quantity of reference line gazes, eye movement during line creation (targeting vs tracking), eye fixation duration, work checks per minute and subject gazes per minute.
The results show a difference in gaze patterns between intermediate and advanced sketchers, both in terms of practice and consistency. Eye-tracking sketching behaviours has revealed a new understanding of how teaching gaze habits could lead to improved methods of design sketching instruction.
]]>Performance assessment plays a crucial role in engineering education. Yet most instructor assessment focuses on student outcomes to analyse achievements. Although there is extensive research analysing student productions, however, few studies have explored assessment from instructor perspectives, especially when reporting their assessment practice. This study examines instructors' assessment of student performance through the lens of course review reports (CRRs). The CRRs were collected from 5 core undergraduate courses submitted for annual review and were related to the mappings of the measurable outcomes to performance indicators, assessment methods, and level of engagement. Regardless of the variability in reporting the student design experience, instructors' assessment and potential gaps, as well as strong existing correlations between some indicators and associated assessment methods, the study showed that the CRR may be a powerful and complementary approach to investigate the complexity of multidisciplinary design and design assessment.
]]>The sustainable design transition has proven to be a challenging process, in part due to the diverse set of stakeholders, which includes the general public, policymakers, scientific researchers, and businesses. In prior work, the interconnected relationships among systematic drivers and barriers for sustainable design were identified and mapped using a causal loop diagram at a relatively abstract level. To further understand and characterize this complex system, this research aims to identify the relationship strength levels among the variables in the system, as indicated by previous research identified in the literature. In addition, the knowledge maturity levels of these identified relationships are specified to illustrate strengths and gaps in the literature. The findings are used to create a refined system representation that illustrates the power dynamics between systemic driving forces to sustainable design transitions. The results of this work reveal valuable insights about the linkages among the driving forces of sustainable design transitions that can be used as a foundation for further investigation, such as experiments and data analytics that can better quantify these relationships.
]]>This paper explores the assessment of Critical and Creative Thinking skills among Product Design and Engineering (PDE) students, whose profession holds significant potential for addressing the complex challenges facing global societies. In today's globalized world, higher education institutions must equip students to solve both local and global problems. The lack of emphasis on assessing critical problem-solving skills has led to growing concerns among employers and organizations that graduates may not be adequately prepared to meet the demands of the 21st-century workplace, including PDE.
This paper uses a case study approach to evaluate the performance of final-year PDE students, specifically their Critical and Creative Thinking abilities. The study assesses two groups, Group A and Group B, which produce solutions focused on the marketplace and design sustainable solutions, respectively. The study concludes that solving wicked problems that require sustainable solutions demands a higher level of these skills. The study's findings are consistent with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2022 report, which also highlighted low levels of CriT and CreT in students at the same level studied for this paper.
]]>During some applied anatomy lessons, physiotherapist students must develop a skill of locating and recognizing underlying anatomical elements, from surface palpations, or through clinical tools on their classmates. For this, precise procedures exist and students have to mobilize knowledge acquired from different types of resources: support documents from the teacher, anatomical charts (books, drawings, diagrams), dissection videos or even internet resources. They also need more practical time and exercises. The issues facing students relate to the availability of these resources during the procedure, their relevance, the mobilisation of resources to practice and the applicability in a real situation.
This project stems from a desire to make Augmented Reality technology available to students, to help in learning precise clinical procedure, in our case the location of the auscultation points using a stethoscope. The aim would be to supplement the real environment of the student during his learning on a person, by the possibilities of having additional resources according to its needs (auscultation points superimposed on a 3D representation of the lungs).
]]>In product development, it is of great importance that a complete, unambiguous, and, as far as possible, contradiction-free target system is defined. Requirements documents of complex systems can contain several thousand individual requirements, derived in an interdisciplinary manner and written in natural language by many different stakeholders. Hence, errors, in the form of contradictions, cannot be completely avoided in these documents and today they must be corrected manually with high effort.
This paper presents an important building block for automated contradiction detection and quality analysis of requirements documents. We discuss the necessary identification of conditions in requirements and the extraction of the verbal expressions associated with condition and effect, respectively. We applied and analyzed natural language processing methods based on grammatical versus machine learning models. The models have been applied to 1,861 real-world requirements. Both approaches generate promising results, with an accuracy partly over 98%. However, in structured specification texts, a grammatical model is preferable due to lower effort in preprocessing and better usability.
]]>The defense industry tends to anticipate environmental issues through eco-design integration in the overall design process. This leads to focus on the impact of technological and design choices of complex systems while maximizing operational performance. Such development involves long and complex processes and is constrained in a project owner and industrial project manager context. In this context poorly described in the literature, the objective of this paper is to identify barriers and drivers to achieve an efficient application of eco-design. A comprehensive analysis of the interactions and the current design processes is performed in the context of the French defense industry. Through internal documentation and semi-structured interviews with the key actors, the generic design process of a project owner is analysed (including relationships with industrial project manager). The failure modes that currently limit the integration of eco-design in projects are also identified.
]]>For some years now, a part of the population in Europe has been willing to moderate its consumption and to enter into a sustainable waste reduction perspective. Repair is an important lever in the sustainability of products. It requires appropriate approaches depending on the actors involved, whether they are public, private or at the consumer level. Repair cafés are thus born of local citizen initiatives to act on the life cycle of everyday consumer products. We conducted a qualitative study based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the actors of repair cafés in the Grenoble area (France) and carried out an analysis of qualitative data. This analysis, according to three pre-defined fields, technology-competencies-motivations, reveals the perception of the actors on the current obstacles and opportunities for the development of the amateur repair practice. The results obtained support studies already carried out on the subject and show that design is still failing to match amateur reparation requirements. Besides, the social role of these third places takes precedence over the ecological and economic dimension of repair.
]]>With the paradigm shift towards Industry 4.0 and digitalisation, manufacturing engineers face several unexplored challenges; in the products for which they are designing production, in the equipment they are designing to realise production systems and in the digitalisation impact on engineering processes. Today's manufacturing system design processes are still based on traditional engineering methods and have difficulties to cope with increased complexity. The aim of this systematic literature review is to explore drivers and barriers to implement digitalisation in engineering processes from a socio-technical perspective. The identified general barriers were cyber security, lack of competence, lack of standards, large investments and resistance to change. For the engineering processes the main drivers were increased product complexity, servitisation, data driven design and engineering productivity, with the main barriers culture, excess amount of data, integration of tools. cyber security and data quality. The study shows the complexity of the challenge, and that it is not only the technology that is the top barrier. Further research is recommended to develop approaches of successful engineering digitalisation implementations.
]]>The research of this paper provides a useful insight into the many barriers leading to building services overdesign, within the context of NHS hospitals. The issue of overdesign in building services is a systemic problem, whereby numerous contributing factors manifest into an issue that inevitably leads to poor system performance and excess costs. A key factor leading to oversizing is the excessive and uncoordinated application of design margins across the various stages of a building services project. Poor communication between project stakeholders is another significant barrier that inhibits the distribution of information between design groups; unknown requirements, system redundancy and poor system specifications further add to the problem. There are many complex interrelationships associated with the building service design process in hospitals, with external stakeholders adding to the complexity. This points to the importance of effective communication between stakeholders and clear contractual terms between NHS Trusts and external private sector organisations. Many of the barriers identified within this paper are by no means limited to building service systems but also impact on a range of other engineering disciplines.
]]>Artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as a great opportunity to secure future competitiveness in many corporate sectors. Potential for its use also exists in product development (PD) activities due to the amount of data generated and processed. Nevertheless, there are problems in applying the technology. This paper addresses current challenges based on a literature review, considering three disciplines that are necessary for the scope of this paper as a minimum: AI itself, information technology infrastructures (ITI) in context of digital transformation (DT), and PD as an application area. Building on the basic considerations of the state of the art, a link between the domains is established by outlining a possible reference framework towards the utilization of AI applications in PD. This enables an expanded interdisciplinary understanding. Key obstacles appear specifically to be difficult collaboration conditions between the disciplines of PD and AI applications development due to communication problems. Reasons for this include:
– Meta models of PD do not provide a sufficient information base
– Lack of standardized process models for the deployment of AI
The health and well-being sector has been of significant interest to the behavioural design domain since bringing in behavioural changes can help improve the overall well-being of a community. However, the domain's intervention in this sector has been limited to persuasive techniques for the adoption of healthier lifestyles. There is a need to consider the diagnostic actions and decisions undertaken by doctors as it represents an important part of health and well-being improvement of people. Medical errors committed by healthcare professionals are an important aspect of the healthcare domain. Since these errors result due to undesired or non-normative behaviours, behavioural design can be instrumental in their eradication. But the research on integrating behavioural design and medical error literature is still nascent.
In this paper, we address this gap by identifying the categories of errors based on the performance levels within which they occur. Next, we contextualise these errors categories to medical literature focusing on the diagnostic stage. We further link it to the behavioural change model of COM-B to determine preliminary intervention functions that can be utilised by behavioural designers to deploy interventions.
]]>The challenges of sustainable development require a consistent transformation of decision-making practices in society and in the industry. In this regard, Virtual Reality (VR) is an effective tool, providing experiences that are not accessible in the real world. The overview effect is a feeling of interconnectedness and responsibility towards our planet and its inhabitants described by astronauts after seeing the Earth during spaceflights. We present a VR application merging the overview effect with data visualization. We illustrate the design process and perform a pilot test to assess the emotions raised by the VR experience. Furthermore, we report feedback from design engineering and sustainability experts discussing the applications' potential in decision-making contexts, including product development processes.
]]>As design thinking became popularized, practitioners in the field pointed out that design thinking rarely takes stakeholders and contexts into account as a result of focusing solely on end-users. We believe such a limitation can be complemented with speculative design, which critiques the future that an idea depicts and interrogates relationships with social, cultural, economical, and political systems. This paper, through pilot interviews with 10 participants and a thematic analysis on interviews with 12 participants, explores possible interaction between design thinking and speculative and critical depiction of the future. Speculative and critical inquiries allowed the participants to consider various social contexts and stakeholders, and further helped them shape and brainstorm the ideas’ potential values and challenges faced during adoption. The overall critical speculation influenced various steps of the design thinking process. The paper contributes to the literature by reporting a novel application of speculative design to the conventional design thinking process. In the future, we hope to further explore other elements of speculative design and their impact on design outcomes.
]]>Without shared experiences, empathy gaps between designers and users are difficult to bridge. Advancing Virtual Reality (VR) has shed new light on this regard by enabling designers to simulate and experience their users' living scenarios in a virtual environment (VE). However, implementing VR-based empathetic design approach requires dealing with critical design questions, such as: (1) whether VR operators can develop empathy for unfamiliar user groups solely based on objective experience and (2) whether VR operators can utilize task-irrelevant contextual information in the VEs. To explore these issues, we designed an experiment based on two VEs with varying levels of detail that simulated the scenes viewed by people with red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Participants were randomly assigned to either detail-rich or detail-simple VEs to complete neutral item-searching tasks. Results indicate that objective and neutral experience alone cannot elicit empathy towards users, and VR operating designers will utilize task-irrelevant contextual information.
]]>Among additive manufacturing processes, wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is one of the most promising methods for manufacturing complex near-net-shape parts, as it allows the layer-by-layer deposition of welded material at a high deposition rate. However, this technology is highly dependent on deposition conditions and thermomechanical phenomena during the process. Therefore, process simulation could be used to analyse the effects of different deposition parameters on the thermomechanical results to optimise the process. However, as the computing time required for this study may become prohibitive, a dedicated strategy is needed to reduce it while maintaining a good level of accuracy. In this study, only the thermal analysis of the process is investigated. An efficient metamodel based on B-spline entities is developed to emulate the thermal response of the WAAM process when building a mild steel four-layer wall structure. Thanks to B-spline entities, the temperature profile at different locations is approximated as a function of a subset of deposition parameters of WAAM process, and the results are compared with the simulated temperature profile resulting from a validation dataset.
]]>Design process descriptions in the literature in general and those using C-K theory in particular lack some useful cognitive information that may affect the credibility of the process. Notions from abduction research are presented and proposed for enhancing such descriptions. Specifically, it is important to distinguish between design activities that are intuitive and those that result from deliberation; a topic that has long been discussed by philosophers of science and design scholars. The focus of the paper is on the ubiquitous design moves of proposing an idea and selecting among ideas, and on their execution by expert and novice designers.
]]>Generative Design (GD) is a design approach that uses algorithms to generate designs. This paper investigates the role of optimisation algorithms in GD process. We study how Pareto Fronts – a classical optimization algorithm output – help designers to browse the variety associated with a design problem. Thanks to the “splitting condition” from design theory, we show that valuable Pareto Fronts for designers are those that allow the exploration of a variety of design parameters without modifying substantially the performance of the designed solution. We call “Splitting Pareto Front” the Pareto Fronts that display this property and investigate how to generate them. We compare, on an electrical battery design problem, two optimization algorithms – NSGA-II and MAP-Elites – based on the design parameters variety they generate. Our results show that MAP-Elites generates Pareto Fronts that are more splitting than those generated by NSGA-II. We then discuss this result in term of the design process: which algorithm is best suited for which design task? We conclude with the importance for future research on Generative Design Algorithms (GDA) to study jointly the functioning of GDA and their expected contribution to the design process.
]]>Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as a benchmark for design for sustainability practices. LCA provides detailed technical documents regarding a product's environmental impact, but its use is often limited to trained experts who share the knowledge with designers. Life cycle experts are highly specialized, and the typical designer faces technical barriers and time constraints in extracting information from LCA documents. This work uses knowledge transfer principles to replicate expert practices in LCA information retrieval to support designers. Life-cycle experts (n = 4) were interviewed to understand practices and challenges in information retrieval for LCA documents. Interview findings were used to create a set of guidelines for effectively navigating LCA documents and then tested in a follow-up task where designers (n = 16) annotated an electric toothbrush LCA using the identified guidelines. Results find designers can effectively extract information from LCA documents given provided guidelines, but need detailed support interpreting complex visual entities like charts and figures. This work is the first step toward enabling knowledge transfer from LCA documents and building a structured sustainability knowledge base.
]]>Nowadays, Western rigid inflatable boat (RIB) manufacturers are facing increased competition from Asian and Middle East producers and the need to push the modularization of their product architecture. Many modularization techniques have been developed to support this effort, being the Modular Function Deployment a well-established multi-stage modularization technique with applications in several industries. Despite the reported literature, the challenges and learnings from the application of modularization techniques have focused on large organizations and complex product systems. In this paper, a case study is presented with the objective of analysing the MFD process implementation in the context of an SME manufacturer of RIB. A learning framework focused on the project and process perspectives is used to facilitate the systematic extraction of lessons from the experience of the MFD implementation. This paper contributes to the modularization techniques literature by observing a modularization method as a learning process and makes it evident the call for more investigation on the implementation process of modularization methods.
]]>As part of the digital transformation towards Industry 4.0, the tasks of staff on the shop floor are changing. Despite increasing automation, complex assembly steps still have to be carried out by humans, especially when it comes to complex products rich in variants, whose assembly cannpt be fully automated for various reasons. Due to increasing individualization and the steadily growing complexity of products, providing the right information at the right time and in the right place is becoming more important. In this context, the visualization of information via novel technologies such as augmented reality plays a crucial role towards an efficient and error-free production process. This paper compiles existing challenges when using augmented reality as a visualization form for an assistance system. On the one hand, the challenges found originate from a systematic literature review and are organized according to predefined categories. On the other hand, these challenges are complemented and compared through findings gained from expert interviews, which are conducted with employees of two European commercial vehicle manufacturers in the field of production. The analysis of the two methods highlights the need for further research.
]]>The think-aloud protocol provides researchers an insight into the designer's mental state, but little is understood about how thinking aloud influences design. The study presented in this paper sets out to measure the cognitive and neurocognitive changes in designers when thinking aloud. Engineering students (n=50) were randomly assigned to the think-aloud or control group. Students were outfitted with a functional near-infrared spectroscopy band. Students were asked to design a personal entertainment system. The think-aloud group spent significantly less time designing. Their design sketches included significantly fewer words. The think-aloud group also required significantly more resources in the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The left DLPFC is often recruited for language processing, and the right DLPFC is involved in visual representation and problem-solving. The faster depletion of neurocognitive resources may have contributed to less time designing. Thinking aloud influences design cognition and neurocognition, but these effects are only now becoming apparent. More research and the adoption of neuroscience techniques can help shed light on these differences.
]]>This study is aimed to understand the relationship between resonance and interpersonal phonetic communication during co-creation from the following points of view: linguistic functional factors and paralinguistic factors. The novice designers were assigned a concept generation task in pairs from the two nouns, “weather” and “stationery”. Linguistic function tags were contracted into five tag groups, Stuckness, Question, Seriousness, Proposition and Positiveness. The results suggest that phonetic communication in resonance showed significantly lower Stuckness and higher Positiveness towards the counterpart's utterances; Silence-based conversation was significantly observed when both were in creative states but had not reached resonance; Resonance was significantly more likely to occur with communication where one mainly spoke and the other also responded with utterances, neither one spoke in dominant amounts, or both spoke in equal amounts.
This study will contribute to understanding and facilitating resonance, which is an essential phenomenon in individual/interpersonal/group creativity, with practical implications, especially for co-creative concept generation and sustainable creative flow in collaborative design.
]]>Chronobiology is the science that studies the role of time in biology. The study of time in human bodies revealed the presence of internal rhythms related to the time of day. Considering divergent thinking as one of the essential cognitive activities of conceptual design, this paper presents the results of investigating the effect of time of day on designers’ brain activity while performing divergent thinking tasks. An experiment was run with a revised Alternative Uses Task, measuring brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. Students with different educational backgrounds were recruited for this experiment, including engineering and industrial design students, to determine if the time of day affected them differently. The brain waves and related power results show significant differences with respect to the time of day and educational background. The differences are particularly evident considering the interaction of these factors. Further studies are required to understand the relationship between the differences detected and the designers’ behavioural performance and to identify which time of day is most effective for idea-generation activities for designers.
]]>Circular ecosystem is a growing research field that is gaining attention due to representing a more robust alignment structure than a single firm. However, prior research lacks empirical evidence on how circular ecosystems are structured and how orchestrators coordinate a set of actors towards a coherent circular value proposition. By studying nine organizations related to the carton packaging recycling ecosystem, we reveal the complexity of recovering and co-creating value in a systemic network with actors competing and collaborating simultaneously. Based on that, we propose a framework for orchestrating circular ecosystems. Our results indicate that orchestrators should integrate strategic actors, invest in infrastructure, and innovate in product design. We also discuss ecosystem resilience during and after the covid 19 pandemic, showing how the orchestrator was fundamental to the sustainability of the ecosystem. Overall, this paper contributes to increasing the understanding of inter-organizational relationships towards the circularity of resources.
]]>Product-service systems (PSS) are one of the business models that can promote circular economy and sustainability; however, to design this kind of solution, holistic approaches must be used, integrating different areas of knowledge. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual solution based on the PSS business model to the problem of reverse logistics of coffee capsules, through the application of the Requirements Engineering method for Sustainable PSS design, with a focus on the initial phase. With an emphasis on the business model and value proposition, a conceptual solution was developed to promote the circularity of the capsule chain based on the analysis of the main stakeholders' needs. The value proposition of the PSS solution for the issue of coffee capsules was described as the “cocreation of sustainable value to stakeholders to foster the circularity of the chain”, considering consumer involvement through education and rewards in product disposal processes. The results reinforce the need to integrate critical stakeholders to add the desired value in creating a sustainable PSS solution and the need to pivot the business model during the solution development process.
]]>While innovation in waste treatment processes continue to advance, plastics are still often put aside in comparison to other materials. It is especially the case for WEEE-plastics: as they are included in complex equipment, their recovery is disregarded, in aid of critical metals and rare earths. The recycling of plastics is hindered by the low re-integration rate of these materials, due to concerns around their quality and their availability. Ecodesign of EEE thus seems to be a robust solution. This paper details two approaches to assess product design, by respectively evaluating the product recyclability and the implementation of predefined ecodesign guidelines. Based on these methods, the construction of a quality standard for recycled plastics in France is presented. The definition of the quality includes mechanical properties, but chemical, logistics, and regulatory aspects are also at stake. Eventually, ecodesign indexes and indicators are selected, and a method for their formal construction is proposed. The goal of this study is to provide ways to assess the overall quality and usability of recycled plastics, along with design for circularity methods to integrate them in new manufactured products.
]]>Global resource consumption is steadily rising. One option for stopping this upward trend is to reduce material consumption in general. With economics built for growth, this is not a practical path to pursue. Another recently explored alternative is the paradigm shift from a linear economy to a circular economy. The most common concept among practitioners and academics comprises the 6R's: Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, and Recycle. In addition to business cases and supply chains that have been adapted to the circular economy, the products themselves must be circular. Developers face the challenge of developing novel products without appropriate experience from previous tasks.
This paper takes up the challenge of gathering relevant methods in the context of circular product development. A classification with regard to the required input data and use case shall help users effectively and efficiently find development methods suitable for their given development task. With the categorization via a product development framework it is pointed out in which phase existing methods support users and where a lack of support occurs.
]]>Automating modelling activities in computer-aided design (CAD) systems is no exception within design automation, one of the current research endeavours aiming to use and transform design-related data in design decision-making processes and the generation and evaluation facilitation of new design solutions. The paper explores the differences between CAD models based on their feature-based CAD modelling sequences that lead to the final models' design. The dataset collected and structured for the study contains more than 1400 CAD models clustered on two levels by using an unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm. The algorithm is performed on the number (total and unique) and the first-order Markov model transition matrices of the CAD modelling operations and their sequential order, respectively. Therefore, three and ten groups (clusters) of CAD models are obtained regarding the level of clustering. The results show that most of the obtained groups are specified by the dominant transition between particular modelling operations. In addition, the study also provides insight into the potential of using feature-based CAD modelling operations' sequences as a first step toward automating the user interaction with the CAD system.
]]>The purpose of the study is to understand the design considerations for creating a provocative financial planning toolkit with services to help facilitate more constructive and meaningful conversations to build trust and empathy between financial advisors and senior people. We conducted four rounds of 60-minute co-creation workshops with eight invited participants from various design disciplines to work in pairs to generate four preliminary concepts suggesting design considerations. We used ATLAS.ti to do qualitative research analysis under an NCT (notice, collecting, thinking) model to identify 22 codes synthesized from verbal and behavioral data. The study concluded with three design principles: 1) the concept of financial planning is about people's expectation management, 2) a financial planning toolkit is designed under service systems, and 3) the tailor-made and modular design features can give financial advisors more flexibility to engage with senior people and enable them to share more about their life stories and needs to recommend financial planning packages precisely according to personal preference, health conditions, and financial status.
]]>Futures Literacy is the capability to imagine and understand potential futures to prepare ourselves to act and innovate in the present. This pilot study aims to understand how artistic methodologies and speculative design can support the collaborative exploration of futures in the context of work and contribute to developing peoples’ capability of futures literacy. Our premise is that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things can augment people and support their needs at work. To illustrate this process, we have presented a collaborative method that integrates an artistic intervention with speculative design activities. We tested the method in a full-day workshop with seventeen (17) participants from a Swedish academy responsible for enabling learning and competence development at work in the healthcare sector. The results indicate that the artistic intervention, combined with the speculative design activities, can challenge current participants’ perspectives and offer them new ways of seeing futures with technologies. These new ways of seeing reveal underlying premises crucial in developing the capability of futures literacy.
]]>Digital fabrication laboratories play a role as an educational environment in which different learning activities incorporate advanced technological developments. Digital fabrication design education often involves exploratory and scaffolded processes of materialising ideas into products. However, FabLabs poses multiple challenges for pedagogy and design learning. Based on a large-scale digital fabrication course in a higher education institution, we examine whether teamwork carried out in a digital fabrication environment improves creativity. Furthermore, we analyse if teamwork affects self-assessment of learning activities involving building tangible artefacts. Finally, we examine whether the type of produced prototype affects the team's overall performance. The results allow for digital fabrication design education recommendations, including interventions intended for improving the creativity of the outcomes, team performance, and learning of different digital fabrication issues.
]]>This viewpoint paper uses two established classifications – March's distinction between exploration and exploitation and Andreasen's Domain Theory – to develop a classification matrix to map industrial challenges and design research topics. Exploration/exploitation and the organ, part and activity domains of Domain Theory are respectively the two dimensions of this classification matrix. Examples are given of the fit of design research and industrial innovation topics into each cell of this matrix, and the need for change in industrial emphasis towards exploration across the range of domains to meet current challenges is discussed. We show how design research covers all categories in the matrix, and argue that using a simple classification may assist the research community in explaining its activities to a wider world, and in organising and directing these activities. We conclude by making suggestions for topics for debate in the design research community.
]]>The transmission of information between requirements modelling and function modelling in the product development process often appears challenging because of multiple used models and different terminology of specific disciplines. The integrated function modelling (IFM) framework is used for functional analysis of technical moderate complex systems and supports cross-disciplinary modelling and communication in the design team. To improve the applicability of this method and its supporting purpose in the modelling process, the authors combined requirements as an additional entity with the existing entities of this method. Furthermore, the extended framework has been used to visualise the procedure with this approach as an example. The outlook provides the potential for further development of the method.
]]>In the design studio, academic (professor) and practitioner tutors provide individual mentoring to students as they progress in their design projects. Prior studies suggest that design practitioners may follow a different design process compared to academics, but little is known about how this difference relates to their design tutoring. This study explores the similarities and differences in tutoring by academics and practitioners. We use a question-asking lens to characterize the tutoring styles of four tutors - two academics and two practitioners - over a five-week design project in an engineering design studio. We find that academic tutors ask questions at a significantly higher rate than practitioner tutors, suggesting a more question-centred tutoring style. We also find that proportionally more of practitioner tutors’ questions are generative in nature, while the academic tutors employ more convergent thinking in their questioning. This may be an indicator of the practitioners' own design thinking, which might be more solution-focused than that of academics. These preliminary findings motivate future investigations of the relationship between differences in tutoring and impact on student design learning.
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