Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method’s tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method’s intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.

Over the last decades, finite element analysis (FEA) has become a standard tool in industrial product development, allowing for virtual analysis of designs, quick turnaround times and prompt implementation of results. Although academic research also provides numerous approaches for evaluating a product’s robustness towards geometrical, material and load variations based on FEA analyses, this, however, stands in striking contrast to the limited use of these FEA-based variation simulations in industry. In order to bridge the existing gap between academic research and industrial application, this paper explores the barriers that limit the adoption of FEA-based variation simulation. The investigation is based on interviews with five lead engineers, followed by a case study that details the underlying technical challenges and allows for some initial suggestions for future solutions. The case study involves a sterile canister with seven geometrical variables. The design objective is to ensure sufficient sealing within the range of expected probabilistic variation. The combined study details the identified main barriers for a wider application, that is, the lack of robust CAD, practical guidelines to select an efficient design of experiments for design purposes, and the complexity of the automated processes. From a technical perspective, the case study results in estimations for main and interaction effects, an accurate metamodel and Monte Carlo simulations of 100,000 samples providing the design engineer with more detailed and actionable insights on the performance of the product compared with the traditional nominal or best/worst case simulations.

Co-design is seen as crucial for designing solutions for resource-constrained people living in developing countries. To best understand their needs, user engagement and co-design strategies need to first be developed. In this Design Practice Brief, a process of co-design was created and used to understand ways telecommunication engineers could engage with rural communities in Uganda. It reports and reflects on (i) the experience of co-designing with nondesigners and (ii) creating a co-design structure and developing co-design methods of engaging with community members living in developing countries. In doing so, it offers a format and case study for future practitioners facilitating and conducting co-design with nondesigners and contributes to a knowledge gap in the reporting and reflection of co-design practice. This case study is unique as the co-design practice was achieved remotely (online), crossed disciplines (designers and telecommunication engineers) and cultural boundaries (European and African). It finds that in co-designing with nondesigners, preparation and structure are key, with acknowledgement and management of cultural and discipline differences.

When a change request is raised in an engineering project an ad hoc team often forms to manage the request. Prior research shows that practitioners often view engineering changes in a risk-averse manner. As a project progresses the cost of changes increases. Therefore, avoiding changes is reasonable. However, a risk-averse perspective fails to recognize that changes might harbor discoverable and exploitable opportunities. In this research, we investigated how practitioners of ad hoc teams used practices and praxes aimed at discovering and exploiting opportunities in engineering change requests. A single case study design was employed using change request records and practitioner interviews from an engineering project. 87 engineering change requests were analyzed with regards to change triggers, time-to-decision and rejection rate. In total, 25 opportunities were discovered and then 17 exploited. Three practices and six praxes were identified, used by practitioners to discover and exploit opportunities. Our findings emphasize the importance of the informal structure of ad hoc teams, to aid in opportunity discovery. The informal structure enables cross-hierarchal discussions and draws on the proven experience of the team members. Thus, this research guides project managers and presumptive ad hoc teams in turning engineering changes into successful opportunities.

Human-centered design provides a means to help designers create products or systems with ‘people’ as the focus. Compassionate Design (CD), introduced in this paper, is an approach that addresses niche sensitive needs and involves a way of thinking where designers pay special attention to the users’ sense of dignity, empowerment, and security. These niche needs surfaced as a result of analyses of 12 cases situated in sensitive contexts where the users felt vulnerable, had a high level of emotional engagement and were negatively affected by the situation. The designers described their deep concern for the users in various talks and interviews. This paper explains the conception of CD and its development that resulted from iteratively and qualitatively analyzing these cases in which designers were intuitively focusing on niche user needs. Dignity, empowerment and security form the basis of CD and have been contextualized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs after they emerged as a result of the analysis of data. This research sets the platform for a design approach that can help designers to consider the often unarticulated user needs of dignity, empowerment and security, in a more intentional manner and not be left to chance.

Among the different phases of complex design processes, early design is the most dynamic and unpredictable stage since it involves a great deal of uncertainty, concurrency of activity streams, collaborative design iterations, and distributed and adaptive decision-making behaviour in response to both organizational commitments and to the occurrence of unforeseen events. This paper argues that current activity-based modelling approaches have limited ability to capture the dynamics of complex early design processes and explores novel modelling approaches. The development of an Agent Model for Planning and rEsearch of eaRly dEsign (AMPERE) aiming to capture various facets of uncertainty, iteration, collaboration and adaptation is described. The model was developed to tackle early design phases of complex systems, with the ability to deal with changes in requirements coming in and affecting the subsequent design evolution while design tasks are on-going. Initial results from agent-based simulations are presented, showing how the agent-based approach can support industrial organizations evaluating likely early design project performance and understanding complex cause–effect relationships that may affect project outcomes. Early design planning support from the agent model is demonstrated through an investigation to the likely project performance for varying levels of externally driven requirements change.

This paper draws on perspectives from co-design as an integrative and collaborative design activity and co-simulation as a supporting information system to advance engineering design methods for problems of societal significance. Design and implementation of the Sustainable Infrastructure Planning Game provides a prototypical co-design artifact that leverages the High Level Architecture co-simulation standard. Three role players create a strategic infrastructure plan for agricultural, water and energy sectors to meet sustainability objectives for a growing and urbaninzing population in a fictional desert nation. An observational study conducts 15 co-design sessions to understand underlying dynamics between actors and how co-simulation capabilities influence design outcomes. Results characterize the dependencies and conflicts between player roles based on technical exchange of resource flows, identifying tension between agriculture and water roles based on water demands for irrigation. Analysis shows a correlation between data exchange, facilitated by synchronous co-simulation, and highly ranked achievement of joint sustainability outcomes. Conclusions reflect on the opportunities and challenges presented by co-simulation in co-design settings to address engineering systems problems.

Taking the perspective of users and stakeholders can help designers incorporate human-centricity in their practice. However, we know relatively little of the dynamics of perspective taking – a cognitive facet of empathy – in design processes as a situated cognitive and behavioural activity, rather than as an overall orientation. To illuminate how perspective taking is used in design, we carried out a longitudinal multiple case study of 49-month-long graduate-level product and service design projects, exploring differences between high and midscale performance in different design phases. Through thematic analysis of review session discussions, we find that perspective taking in high-performing sessions involves three aggregate dimensions: gathering data to form perspectives, scoping and making sense of perspectives and using perspectives in creative processing. We identify phase-dependent characteristics for the scope and emphasis of perspective taking in concept development, system design and detailed design. We also describe different ways in which novice teams struggled to create and apply user perspectives. As a result, the current study sheds light on perspective taking and the changing nature of effective perspective taking across the design process.

Perceived quality refers to customers’ cognitive and emotional responses to a particular design, often also associated with craftsmanship and customer satisfaction. Previous research defined a taxonomy of perceived quality and provided understanding about how engineering design decisions impact customer satisfaction. Furthermore, development of new products is frequently based on carrying over attributes of existing products, either from the same producer or from competitors. Previous research offered a new product development methodology combining variations of subsystems to carry over from existing products. This brief presents how these two lines of research combined to design the central console of the Porsche Panamera automobile and discusses the opportunities and challenges posed in the practical implementation of this research.

In this paper, a concept for a community innovation platform is introduced focusing on human behavior of motivation and barriers in the context of product generation development. Building on the state of the art, a three year case study in cooperation with Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG is at the core. In the first step of the study, a questionnaire and interviews are used to point out that a new attractive channel for ideas is needed. The three perspectives of users, experts and stakeholders are investigated in order to discover needs and preferences. Based on these findings, in a second step, a software prototype was designed and introduced in a pilot project with more than 200 users. Using a questionnaire and expert workshops, in the final step, this project is evaluated as appealing to the community, and the generated content is demonstrated to be valuable to specific activities of product generation development.

Engineered system architectures leveraging collaboration among multiple actors across organizational boundaries are envisioned to be more flexible, robust, or efficient than independent alternatives but also carry significant downside risks from new interdependencies added between constituents. This paper transitions the concept of risk dominance from equilibrium selection in game theory to engineering design as a strategic measure of collective stability for system of systems. A proposed method characterizes system design as a bi-level problem with two or more asymmetric decision-makers. A measure of risk dominance assesses strategic dynamics with respect to the stability of joint or collaborative architectures relative to independent alternatives using a novel linearization technique to approximate linear incentives among actors. An illustrative example case for an asymmetric three-player design scenario shows how strategic risk dominance can identify and mitigate architectures with unstable risk-reward dynamics.

The computer aided internal optimisation (CAIO) method produces an optimised fibre layout for parts made from fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP), starting from an initial shell geometry and a given load case. Its main principle is iterative reduction of shear stresses by aligning fibre main axes with principal normal stress trajectories. Previous contributions, ranging from CAIO’s introduction over testing to extensions towards multi-layer FRP laminates, highlighted its lightweight design potential. For its application to laminate design approaches, alterations have been proposed; however, questions remain open. These questions include which convergence criteria to use, how to handle ambiguous principle normal stress trajectories, influence of using multi-layer CAIO optimisation instead of the initial single-layer CAIO and how dire consequences of slightly deviating fibre orientations from the optimised trajectories are. These challenges are discussed in depth and guidelines are given. This paper is an enhanced version of a distinguished contribution at the first symposium ‘Lightweight Design in Product Development’, Zurich (June 14–15, 2018).

The wearable product market is growing rapidly and is full of products with similar functions and features. Engaging users at an emotional level may be the key to differentiating a product and encouraging long-term use. While researchers have proposed various design approaches to realize design qualities for wearable devices, emotional needs are often extracted by analysis-heavy methods and disconnected in the design process. To bridge this gap, we developed a new approach that uses a two-axis interactive collage tool for users to compare and evaluate wearable products with targeted emotion-related descriptive words. This approach enabled designers to explore how users perceive products and identify types of emotions that were associated with users’ preferences for and perception of the product’s form and visible characteristics. The example study demonstrated this approach by exploring the relationships between product characteristics and design goals, such as user comfort, user delight, and perceived product usefulness. The results showed that products that resemble clothing were perceived as more delightful and comfortable. The approach can be further used to explore other design concepts or goals.

Automakers are interested in creating optimal car shapes that can visually convey environmental friendliness and safety to customers. This research examined the influence of vehicle form on perceptions based on two subjective inference measures: safety and perceived environmental friendliness (PEF). A within-subjects study was conducted in 2009 (Study 1) to study how people would evaluate 20 different vehicle silhouettes created by designers in industry. Participants were asked to evaluate forms on several scales, including PEF, safety, inspired by nature, familiarity, and overall preference. The same study was repeated in 2016 (Study 2). The results from the first study showed an inverse relationship between PEF and perceptions of safety. That is, vehicles that appeared to be safe were perceived to be less environmentally friendly, and vice versa. Participants in the second study showed a similar trend, but not as strongly as the 2009 participants. Several shape variables were identified to be correlated with participants’ PEF and safety ratings. The changes in the trend of participants’ evaluations over seven years were also discussed. These results can provide designers with insights into how to create car shapes with balanced PEF and safety in the early design stage.

Coordination of distributed design work is an important activity in large-scale and complex engineered systems (LSCES) design projects. Coordination strategies have been studied formally in system design optimization and organizational science. This article reports on a study to identify what strategies are used in coordination practice. While the literature primarily offers prescriptive coordination strategies, this study focussed on the contribution of individuals’ behaviours to system-level coordination. Thus, a coordination strategy is seen as a particular set of individual actions and behaviours. We interviewed professionals with expertise in systems engineering, project management and technical leadership at two large aerospace design organizations. Through qualitative thematic analysis, we identified two strategies used to facilitate coordination. The first we call authority-based and is enabled by technical know-how and the use of organizational authority; the second we call empathetic leadership and includes interpersonal skills, leadership traits and empathy. These strategies emerged as complementary and, together, enabled individuals to coordinate complex design tasks. We found that skills identified in competency models enable these coordination strategies, which in turn support management of interdependent work in the organization. Studying the role of individuals contributes an expanded view on how coordination facilitates LSCES design practice.

A wide range of disciplines are directing their methods and tools to help address the challenges of healthcare. Chief among these are design and operational research (OR). Though they have much in common, these two disciplines have existed in isolation for most of their history and there is currently a gulf between the two research communities. In this position paper, we rapidly review the contributions of design and OR in healthcare. We then identify similarities and complementarities between the two disciplines and communities when they consider healthcare systems. Finally, we propose practical steps to enable better collaboration. Our focus is on finding ways in which the two disciplines complement each other. When applying design to healthcare services, designers may wish to learn from OR, which has a long history of supporting improvements in healthcare organisation and services, particularly using quantitative data and analysis and modelling methods. In return, design has distinctive qualities that could augment the OR approach, such as its emphasis on wide and creative search for potential solutions, and iterative co-production and prototyping of solutions with clients. Better collaboration will require a coordinated effort but could yield a more comprehensive and effective approach to improving healthcare systems.

Seasonal effects can significantly impact the robustness of socio-technical systems (STS) to demand fluctuations. There is an increasing need to develop novel design approaches that can support capacity planning decisions for enhancing the robustness of STS against seasonal effects. This paper proposes a new network motif-based approach to supporting capacity planning in STS for an improved seasonal robustness. Network motifs are underlying nonrandom subgraphs within a complex network. In this approach, we introduce three motif-based metrics for system performance evaluation and capacity planning decision-making. The first one is the imbalance score of a motif (e.g., a local service network), the second one is the measurement of a motif’s seasonal robustness, and the third one is a capacity planning decision criterion. Based on these three metrics, we validate that the sensitivity of STS performance against seasonal effects is highly correlated with the imbalanced capacity between service nodes in an STS. Correspondingly, we formulate a design optimisation problem to improve the robustness of STS by rebalancing the resources at critical service nodes. To demonstrate the utility of the approach, a case study on Divvy bike-sharing system in Chicago is conducted. With a focus on the size-3 motifs (a subgraph consisting three docked stations), we find that there is a significant correlation between the difference of the number of docks among the stations in a motif and the return/rental performance of such a motif against seasonal changes. Guided by this finding, our design approach can successfully balance out the number of docks between those stations that have caused the most severe seasonal perturbations. The results also imply that the network motifs can be an effective local structural representation in support of STS robust design. Our approach can be generally applied in other STS where the system performances are significantly impacted by seasonal changes, for example, supply chain networks, transportation systems and power grids.

In order to reduce the time spent on tolerance analysis, it is necessary to correctly identify and prioritize the key characteristics of the product. For multiple-state mechanisms, a systematic procedure for doing this is lacking. We present a new complexity metric for multiple-state mechanisms based on the product behavior, describing the impact of geometrical variation. The sequence of the structural state transitions is linked to the product composition, enabling a clear prioritization of variation-critical states and interfaces. The approach is applied on an industrial case and verified based on a comparison with the company-specified priority tolerance calculations.

The diversity of design research studies and their associated methods and reporting style make it difficult for the design research community of practice to leverage its work into further advancing the field. We illustrate how a structured multilevel analysis of diverse studies creates a canonical model that allows for the transfer of insight between studies, enhances their comprehension, and supports improved study designs. The benefits of such an approach will increase if different stakeholders adopt such structured approaches to enrich the design research community of practice.

The continuous integration and verification of components is essential in distributed design processes. Identifying the optimal integration and verification frequency, however, can be challenging due to the complexity of product development. Especially the effect of human decision-making in partially isolated development scenarios is difficult to consider. Thus, we performed an experimental study based on the following three steps: first, an extension of the existing parameter design framework, which is used to conduct experiments under laboratory conditions, in which human subjects solve quantitative surrogate design tasks. Second, a series of experiments in which 32 subjects divided into groups of two solved 229 parameter design tasks with a varying integration and verification frequency. And, third, a statistical analysis of the results with respect to development time, coupling strength and process costs. According to our results, development time can be reduced by up to 71%, if the integration and verification frequency is doubled. If process costs are also considered, the optimal frequency can be subject to a conflict of goals between reducing development time and minimising process cost.