In safety-critical industries such as aerospace, managing uncertainty is important, both to ensure airworthiness and to control business risk. Although design margins are widely used to support safety, reliability and regulatory compliance, they are often applied conservatively, with rationales that are implicit, inconsistently documented or unevenly interpreted. While the use of margins is necessary from a safety, reliability and regulatory perspective, excessive use of margins can lead to undesirable effects such as overdesign, consequently leading to heavier parts and therefore design inefficiencies. While the role of margins in this context is well appreciated, there is a gap between the theoretical understanding of margins and their use in practice, especially in relation to uncertainty. This paper investigates this gap through a qualitative study involving 11 in-depth interviews with experienced engineers and managers at a leading aerospace component design and manufacturing company. The interviews explore the current industrial practices, cultural barriers and decision-making heuristics surrounding the practice of design margins. The findings reveal a reliance on legacy practices and tacit knowledge, which may limit margin transparency and potentially contribute to margin stacking. We conclude with actionable implications for the proper documentation and use of margins in engineering design.

The Design Society unites researchers and practitioners to advance innovative engineering design. As entrepreneurship grows in importance, integrate design principles into its education seems necessary. This paper reviews Design Society publications to map how entrepreneurship, education, and sustainability intersect, it identifies the Design Society’s contributions in the field to propose strategies and future research to strengthen its influence. It highlights the possible role of the Design Society in leading education advancements in entrepreneurship and sustainability.

We propose a wearable soft robot that assists with individualized scapula adduction and abduction for thoracic stretching in respiratory rehabilitation. Although thoracic stretching is known to be effective for respiratory rehabilitation, the range of motion of older adult patients narrows with age, and long-term external aid by physical therapists is required. The proposed robot consists of a soft and shoulder-wearable brace and cable-pulling mechanism to apply rotational torque on shoulders, resulting in stretching the thorax and scapulae. We designed the pulling mechanism by modeling the humeral head trajectory during stretching by a therapist and reproducing it with two linear actuators pulling the right and left shoulders simultaneously, based on position control aimed at achieving a target tension. The main results of validation experiments with older adults confirmed that the robot-assisted stretching was able to perform scapular stretching similar to that of a physical therapist.

Poor posture is a significant concern due to its detrimental effects on health and productivity. This article presents a collar-clipped device called PostureClip, designed to restrict users from sitting and working at a bent angle, by blacking out the screen and resuming on correcting posture, thereby promoting better posture. The device integrates sensors and feedback mechanisms to provide real-time posture feedback to users. To evaluate the effectiveness of PostureClip, a controlled experiment was conducted with participants (n = 165) who were working on a laptop/PC for over 6 hours per day. The participants were randomly assigned to both the intervention group (IG1, n = 54; IG2, n = 55), which used the collar-clipped device, and the control group (CG, n = 56), which did not use the device. IG1 did not get feedback, while IG2 got feedback from the device by notifying and further darkening the screen. The study was conducted in the office environment of the participants, for 4 weeks, and metrics such as posture angle, duration of bent angle, and user feedback were collected. Analysis revealed significant improvements in posture angle (p < .001) and a significant reduction in bent angle duration (p < .01) for the participants’ group using PostureClip with feedback and compared to the group without feedback and the control group (who were not intervened). The qualitative analysis of user feedback highlighted the device’s ease of use, effectiveness in providing timely feedback, and positive impact on participants’ awareness and habits regarding posture. These results indicate that PostureClip is an effective tool for promoting better posture during sedentary work.

Direct collocation (DC) methods are utilized for addressing trajectory optimization challenges in robotics due to their ability to generate dynamically consistent solutions. However, in the cable-driven robotic systems, where tension constraints impose kinodynamic restrictions, maintaining accuracy becomes significantly complex. This article addresses robot tensionability and proposes a method to overcome the limitations. A DC method is proposed to minimize the actuator force rate in a trajectory planning problem for a designed cable-driven parallel robot. The system comprises a 3-cable parallel mechanism with a central spine to counteract the end-effector’s weight and enhance tensionability. Integrating a pneumatic cylinder into the system that supports trajectory planning implementation is essential to minimize jerky motions. The DC method is applied through the proposed quadratic programming approach and benchmarked against existing packages to achieve and compare the resulting smoother trajectory. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces computation cost and enhances accuracy. Experimental data corroborate the simulation results, validating the method’s efficacy.

Individuals with limb loss present significant challenges to testing and evaluating prosthetic devices, such as medical approval processes and participant availability. Prosthesis simulators, designed for mimicking prosthesis use with able-bodied individuals, offer an alternative to conducting controlled experiments and enhancing the development of prosthetic technologies. This review examines the design features, applications, and limitations of lower limb prosthesis simulators. A literature search identified 73 studies that have used lower limb prosthesis simulators. Most studies have focused on transfemoral prosthesis simulators (TFsims) and testing prosthetic designs and control mechanisms. The most frequently assessed movement was walking, while other movements, were explored only sporadically. The findings reveal significant variability in simulator configurations, training protocols, and the range of movements assessed. Additionally, a notable research gap exists in evaluations of the effect of transtibial prosthesis simulators (TTsims) and hip disarticulation prosthesis simulators (HDsims) on gait. Despite these challenges, prosthesis simulators offer promising potential for accelerating and improving prosthesis development while putting less stress on the relatively small target group of individuals with limb loss. Further research is needed to standardize methodologies and better understand the effects of simulator design and training on gait performance to facilitate advancements in prosthetic research.

This paper involves the unlikely partnering of a designer/design educator and an environmental philosopher of education as they consider together pedagogical responses to the metacrisis. It will begin with an exploration of some recent research that positions education at the heart of the project of eco-social – cultural change. Then, using six prompts proposed as a starting place for this type of education we will follow a full semester of a third-year undergraduate design class as students are immersed in a curriculum created with a vision towards both eco-social – cultural change and, by implication, ‘doing design differently’. Through this reflective study, the research hopes to explore some of the successes, failures, learnings, and potential challenges that exist for students, educators, and theories of educational change in the work of educating in, through, and beyond these times of crisis. The paper will end with a rendering of our findings and an extended discussion of the pedagogical possibilities, prompts, and peculiarities of teaching during this metacrisis and some considerations around the potentialities and limitations of these six prompts for eco-social – cultural change and environmental education.

Foundation models are many things and encompass several modalities; they use text, images, sound, and more recently, action or inference units. But all of these forms share one thing in common: the (massive) scale. The “large” in large language models has been well studied by scholars in critical data, AI and archive studies, with several experts pointing at how these models are environmentally harmful, technically opaque and corporationally monopolistic primarily because of their scale. This piece discusses questions of technical and cultural scale – in the material, archival and procedural senses – within the contemporary technical and discursive landscape. At stake here is the role of critical and design studies within academic, artistic and para-academic worlds. It suggests that instead of corporate chatbots that aspire to pass the Turing test through multipurpose, encyclopedic service, we may be better served by playing with local models and reaching for small-scale AI development. This epistemological shift, in fact, may also provide some creative and critical potential that more effectively gets at the strangeness of machine learning systems while consciously and carefully handling the scalar environmental and social impacts of big AI.

Ankle-foot mechanisms are designed to substitute for missing anatomical behavior of lower-limb prosthesis users. Historically, the majority of ankle-foot mechanism research has been focused on transtibial prosthesis users despite evidence that current knowledge is not directly translated to transfemoral prosthesis users, such as the influence of single-axis knee alignment during gait and the differences in standing balance management. This review attempts to characterize the current state of published knowledge about the effects of ankle-foot prosthesis design on standing and walking performance in transfemoral prosthesis users. The databases of PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and IEEE Xplore were searched on January 6, 2025. Data from the selected articles were extracted and reported following the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews. Thirty-five articles were included that reported on seven different types of feet, ranging from simple designs like a solid ankle-cushioned heel (SACH) foot to more complex ones such as a microprocessor foot. The range of reported study tasks extended from standing and level walking to more complex tasks like incline/decline slopes and parcourse walking. The results suggest some parallels between transfemoral and transtibial prosthesis users, such as improvements with the incorporation of roll-over-shape (ROS) features and adaptation of a hydraulic ankle. The literature also emphasized how ankle-foot components affect ground force vector position and direction, influencing prosthetic knee control, highlighting the importance of considering the interaction between the prosthetic ankle-foot and knee mechanisms. Understanding these interactions will support the development of clinical practice guidelines by identifying the pair of prosthetic components that maximizes performance.

Robot grippers have drawn a lot of attention due to their various applications in the fields of manufacturing, agriculture, etc. The shape and mass of the workable objects have been considerable issues. For effective gripping, many studies have sought to control gripping forces; however, force control often requires complex external control structures. Here, it is aimed to develop a gripper of simple structure that resists moments, grasps object edges in the absence of complete object envelopment, and does not tilt the object. Moment resistance and edge grasping are key capabilities in ensuring stable object gripping. To ensure an energy-efficient, simple structure, a mechanical trigger and a variable torque joint link the output torque to the finger actuation angle without electrical sensing. The variable torque joint creates different torques for each finger, thus ensuring the sufficient reactive moments required for stable gripping without tilting the object. To implement the output torque profile, a mechanical cam was designed and utilized in the torque joint. The developed gripper effectively resists moments and grasps object edges without the need for electrical components such as sensors, wires, or batteries. This study shows that form-sensing data can be used in various scenarios to ensure successful gripping.

In view of the post-stroke finger contracture period, the patient’s muscle weakness causes the fingers to bend and not be extended, and the fingers are in a contracture state. A new hand rehabilitation exoskeleton with a cable and leaf spring hybrid drive is designed. The high-stiffness leaf spring helps the patient complete the extension movement, and the flexion and grasping movement is completed under the action of the cable. The exoskeleton combines the cable and the leaf spring in the driving form. It is flexible and can generate enough grasping force to meet daily activities. The workspace when wearing the exoskeleton is analyzed, and the simulation verifies that the exoskeleton has a high movement space. The stiffness of the finger module is analyzed to determine the appropriate size parameters of the leaf spring. The experimental prototype is built, and the structural performance test is carried out. A prosthetic hand model is made to simulate the hand of a patient without motor ability. The position control is carried out to complete the gesture experiment and grasping experiment, which verifies that the exoskeleton can meet the rehabilitation needs and daily grasping movements. Finally, a variety of performance parameters are designed to evaluate a variety of exoskeletons. The comparison shows that the exoskeleton in this paper has significant advantages, and the area coverage rate of the performance evaluation map can reach 70.4% of the ideal exoskeleton.

This paper explores what makes relevance difficult to deliver. Researchers can be victims of the play of politics in policy settings and organizational blockages limit the numbers of academics that seek to achieve relevance. In addition the scholarly arguments for relevance are underdeveloped leaving scope for sustained doubts about the project. Crucially political science lacks a design arm and as a result it is deficient in the intellectual foundations needed to proffer solutions to political problems.

Design Science is the discipline that studies the creation of artifacts – products, services, and systems and their embedding in our physical, virtual, psychological, economic, and social environments. This editorial is a collective effort of the Design Science Journal’s editorial board members, past and present. The journal’s inaugural 2015 editorial, “Design Science: Why, What and How,” reflected the thoughts and vision of that first editorial board for the new journal and the discipline it represented. The present contribution offers the reflections of editors who served the journal in the past 10 years. The individual contributions were not primed and are presented here unedited for conformity or consistency. Differently from the 2015 editorial, there is no effort to synthesize the individual contributions, leaving the task to our readers, who can draw their own conclusions about the Design Science Journal and community accomplishments to date, and the challenges ahead.

This article investigates “livingness” at the convergence of design, human–computer interaction (HCI) and synthetic biology, emphasising the evolving role of materialism. It examines living artefacts – objects designed with life-like qualities that utilise natural, engineered or programmable materials. The study thoroughly reviews theoretical underpinnings, highlighting new materialism’s focus on the agency of matter and HCI’s material turn, underscoring the value of physical interaction with digital systems. It also discusses recent advancements in living organisms as integral elements in design, aimed at reducing environmental impact and creating new user experiences. Through a systematic literature review and an in-depth analysis of case studies, the article proposes an extended definition of “livingness” across the three disciplines, advancing the understanding of the functions of living artefacts, how life-like capabilities can be integrated into them, and the implications for regenerative design. The findings invite a reimagined relationship between humans, materials and technology, fostering sustainable and interactive design practices.