Computer-Aided Design (CAD) constitutes an important tool for industrial designers. Similarly, Virtual Reality (VR) has the capability to revolutionize how designers work with its increased sense of scale and perspective. However, existing VR CAD applications are limited in terms of functionality and intuitive control. Based on a comparison of VR CAD applications, ImPro, a new application for immersive prototyping for industrial designers was developed. The user evaluations and comparisons show that ImPro offers increased usability, functionality, and suitability for industrial designers.

The concepts of high-velocity, complexity and interdependency are nowadays vividly discussed in design-led innovation management. Design organisations seek to manage innovation in a more dynamic way to ensure competitive advantage and long-term competitiveness. Contextual ambidexterity is advised to be a dynamic capability that can facilitate firms to effectively manage incremental and radical innovation alike. This paper proposes an approach that focuses on the individual and the underlying thinking which bases its foundations on ambidextrous leadership, abductive reasoning and strategic fit.

Innovation portfolio management (IPM) aims at selecting ideas with regard to their potential for innovation and measuring them considering customer and business value. The evaluation of benefits and risk is especially challenging for disruptive innovation (DI) due to their characteristics such as low comparability to existing technologies and uncertain customer reactions. This paper highlights the lack of approaches to managing DI in IPM and addresses it through a framework that expands the understanding of value-orientation in IPM, allowing for the inclusion of DI.

When using product-service systems as a business model, new product development challenges and opportunities arise. Due to the possibility of customizing the product fleet depending on the user-scenarios, more product variants are possible and often necessary. Therefore, this paper presents an approach for the automated functionality and design optimization for user scenario specific use cases. The approach combines an optimization framework with a functional simulation model and a generative design approach CAD model. This results in a robust and simultaneously flexible design environment.

The paper describes the rigorous implementation of a validated methodological experimental protocol to divergent and convergent thinking tasks occurring in Design by neurophysiological means (EEG and eye-tracking). EEG evidence confirms the findings coherently to the literature. Interesting is the confirmation of such results through eye-tracking ones, and further evidence emerged. In particular, neurophysiological results in idea generation differ between designers and engineers. This study was supported by a multidisciplinary team, both for the neuropsychological and data analysis aspects.

Prototyping is a key part of the design process, with artefacts increasingly fabricated using 3D printing methods. However, these printed parts often lack internal structure and the mass properties of the artefact – mass, balance and moments of inertia – differ from the design. It is hypothesised that a stakeholder's assessment of a design is affected by this misrepresentation. The work presented demonstrates that mass properties have a significant effect on stakeholder perception of prototypes. This is done through a study of University of Bristol students and consultation with industry.

Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems were created to address the driver's failures. All these ADAS are a part of the evolution of the vehicles towards whole automation. To complete its launch in the automotive market, autonomous vehicles have to pass safety tests to acquire the consumers’ trust. To receive the approval of the public, the self-driving car has to take into account the human feeling. The risk perceived by the driver is one of the new emotional form to integrate at the validation plan. The purpose of this study is to examine the perception of the risk of a self-driving car's driver.

Designers use their tacit knowledge to estimate project design effort needs, which can be enhanced through the understanding of the factors that most influence those needs. Evaluating and assessing project briefs against these factors can assist designers when planning their projects. The Collaborative Project Brief Scorecard (CPDS) Method identifies those factors and produces a scorecard for designers to evaluate project briefs based on these factors and allows for project comparisons, aids in past project recall and provides a focal point for collaborative reflection on design activities.

Behavioural design has emerged as an important domain of design practice and research due to its ability to deliver the desired outcomes beyond technical designs. Research on behavioural design is not successful in discerning it from other design domains, which is important for theory building. This paper discerns the unique characters of behavioural design by tracing the emergence of behaviour in design. Twelve interviews from six behaviour design cases belonging to four firms has been used to further discern the unique characteristics resulting into the conceptual model of behavioural design

This paper looks at the positive effects of partial status anonymity in face-to-face co-creation workshops. Results suggest that especially during the early phases of co-creation, i.e. idea generation, participants experience more freedom to express themselves without self-imposed barriers. We observed positive effects in terms of (1) lowering or even suspending the perceived status among team members, (2) increased motivation, (3) freedom to speak and positive disposition to listen, (4) willingness to consider perspectives from other team members.

Coworking spaces – the most prevalent form of collaborative workplaces – are said to offer the ideal solution for a new generation of creative knowledge workers, balancing flexibility and independence with structure and community. Recent studies, however, highlight deficiencies as they relate to the promise of ‘community’ made by most coworking spaces. This work reports 16 barriers that impede the process of human connectivity in coworking spaces that emerged from in-depth interviews with 26 coworkers. Suggestions are made for how these barriers might inform more effective workplace design.

Policymakers have attempted to preemptively address the concern of ethical issues with the regulation of automated vehicles. Unfortunately, both policymakers and designers of these technologies struggle to articulate ethical issues and their resolution. We propose a framework that engineers and designers of automated technologies can apply that allows them to identify and resolve ethical tensions within the design task. We demonstrate the practicability of the framework to the engineering design process through a human-subject study where engineers applied the framework in a workshop.

User integration is a key aspect of new product development. When applying corresponding methods, however, there is a communication gap that needs to be overcome by the designer. Prototyping is a means to bridge this disjunction, yet brings its own set of hermeneutic limitations. Taking a closer look at the processual information exchange, we propose the concept of the user-driven minimum feasible product (UD-MFP). It describes the artefact generated by the users themselves in their specific context, which contains the essence of the problem's solution as a possible source of validation.

Various aspects of the design process often lead to stress. This study used pre- and post-task surveys to gather information regarding the designer's cognitive experience, physiological response, and perceived sources of stress during concept generation, concept selection, and prototyping. Results confirmed that design is highly cognitive, and that mental stress is present. Variability in the results also suggests that a physiological stress component might be present. Additionally, perceived sources of stress were examined, and recommendations were offered for instructors of design courses.

This paper presents experience-oriented aspects of the development of wearable assistive devices (exoskeletons) for industrial purposes, an area which has only begun to be explored. Our research aims to examine user acceptance criteria for assistive devices and understand the meaning of interaction with wearable assistive devices for the users. The resulting models deliver new insights about the importance of user experience for technology acceptance and should be generally considered in development processes of wearable assistive devices.

This study explores the effects of time pressure in dexterous operations on two types of interface: the fixed interface and the moving interface. Results show that the accuracy of finger movement is decreased, the information processing on the sense of sequence, position and direction is worsened by the psychological disturbance. The findings indicate that a fixed interface is more robust to performance and participants can learn and perform tasks quicker than a moving interface. Finally, the researchers give some practices on both fixed and moving interface design.

The paper presents a comparative study that explores the effectiveness of creative stimuli to foster the generation of creative ideas in non-trained professionals during a co-creative design session. Solution-related stimuli (e.g. patents or biological strategies) are confronted with problem-based stimuli (e.g. TRIZ contradictions or Ideal Final Result), which are less studied in the literature. The 40 participants to the experimental activity benefited from both kind of stimuli, but the solution-related ones allowed a more comprehensive exploration of the design space.

This paper deals with the development of participatory methods in visual management (VM) when investigating parts and system/s related to VM devices in organisational contexts. Four theoretical perspectives – sociocultural theory, boundary objects, diagrams, maps and models, and visual rhetoric – have been applied to gain an overall understanding of the participants’ collective investigation of the system/s. Managers and co-workers in five Lean-inspired organisations have used the method Multimodal Origami (MO) to design their VM devices, in this case the VM boards and associated meetings.

Human-computer hybrid teams can meet challenges in designing complex engineered systems. However, the understanding of interaction in the hybrid teams is lacking. We review the literature and identify four key attributes to construct design research platforms that support multi-phase design, hybrid teams, multiple design scenarios, and data logging. Then, we introduce a platform for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) design embodying these attributes. With the platform, experiments can be conducted to study how designers and intelligent computational agents interact, support, and impact each other.

While women are underrepresented in leadership across the industrial western world, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on how these stereotypes play out across cultural contexts, and their relative strengths. Our goal was to launch an ambitious comparative survey study of global corporations to increase knowledge on how gender stereotypes operate across cultures, and employee perceptions of gender equality in the workplace. The results provide a better understanding of the obstacles to women's professional development and identify levers for promoting gender diversity in large groups.