Graph-based design languages offer a promising approach to address several major issues in engineering, e. g. the laborious manual transfer between CAD and CAE. Such languages generate a digital meta- or system model storing all relevant information about a design and feed this into any relevant CAE tool as needed to simulate and test the impact of any design variation on the resulting product performance. As this can be automated in digital compilers to perform systematic design variation for an almost infinite amount of parameters, such graph-based languages are a powerful means to generate viable design alternatives and thus permit fast evaluations.

To leverage the full potential of graph-based design languages, possibilities are presented to expand their applicability into the domain of product functions. This possibilities allow to cohesively link integrative function modelling to product structures. This intends to close the gap between the early, abstract stages and the systematic, concrete design generation and validation with relevant CAE tools. In this paper, the IFM Framework was selected as integrated function model to be linked with the graph- based design languages.

Technological advances as well as novel manufacturing and design paradigms, such as industry 4.0 and digitalization, offer new opportunities for innovative products. However, they also increase the product complexity and cause new challenges in the production process. Therefore, agile production approaches are crucial. Tolerance compensation provides more flexibility in the production process, as demands on dimensional accuracy of the components are reduced. As a result, tolerance compensation also offers the possibility of reducing production costs without compromising product quality. Nevertheless, tolerance compensation is often considered a reactive intervention to reduce the number of out-of-spec parts a posteriori instead of including it in the early stages of Geometrical Variations Management. The contribution tackles this issue by characterizing and categorizing different methods of tolerance compensation as well as providing design guidelines for the application of tolerance compensation methods. This enables design engineers to select a suitable tolerance compensation method for different applications.

In modular products conflicting objectives may occur. This leads to characteristics as component-dependent oversizing and undersizing as well as increased complexity of the interfaces. These conflicts can be resolved using the potentials of AM processes. For the best use possible, the potentials are systematically considered in the early design phases as part of an extended procedure. The extended procedure improves the benefit-effort ratio of modular respectively individual products and a further optimization of the product architecture and consideration of synergy effects is achieved.

In this paper, the authors propose a culture-centred tool called Speculative Ethnography to support the practice of design for the speculative future. Most explorations of tools and techniques of design for the speculative future focus on materialising the speculation. Instead, Speculative Ethnography provides a guideline to help designers define their speculation through the scientific imagination of the plausible future. It ensures the effectiveness of design for the speculative future and supports the interaction of culture and design for the speculative future.

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.

Engineering work is mostly done in 3D CAD software throughout the engineering process from conceptual design and layout of products. Physics-Based Virtual Prototypes are very valuable addition on Computer Aided Engineering enabling product development simulators, training simulators and digital twin concept in product lift-cycle process. In this work, we present a framework, how such virtual prototypes can be developed from 3D CAD models with meaningful effort.

The world is ageing, and this change will strongly impact the design of products, services and environments. Notwithstanding the proliferation of research initiatives, guidelines, policies and regulations, there is still a significant gap and lack of a uniformed strategy to guide engineers, designers, and architects to design inclusive environments. This article explores and summarizes through a review of international regulations and standards, the requirements that design practitioners need to consider when designing accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments. With this explorative study, we reviewed documentation and developed a comprehensive ontology comprised of people and design related criteria aiming to support the design of inclusive, smart and accessible buildings. The ontology was created by interpreting the criteria through semantics used in peoplecentered design approaches, where people's needs and design requirements are two fundamental phases for designing inclusively.

The results are intended to enable researchers and practitioners to better identify clusters of accessibility and inclusion criteria to facilitate the study and the design of accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments.

In practical design work, a designer needs to consider the feasibility of a part for a manufacturing using additive manufacturing (AM) instead of conventional manufacturing (CM) technology. Traditionally and by default parts are assumed to be manufactured using CM and using AM as an alternative need to be justified. AM is currently often a more expensive manufacturing method than CM, but its employment can be justified due to number of reasons: improved part features, faster manufacturing time and lower cost. Improved part features means usually reduced mass or complex shape. However, in low volume production lower manufacturing time and lower part cost may rise to the most important characteristics.

In this paper, we present a practical feasibility model, which analyses the added value of using AM for manufacturing. The approach is demonstrated in the paper on four specific parts. They represent real industrial design tasks that are ordered from an engineering office company. These parts were manufactured by Selective Laser Meting (SLM) technology and the original design done for conventional manufacturing is also presented and used for comparison purpose.

In Industrial Design, new design visualisation tools are emerging offering significant benefits to the designers. However, studies show alongside some benefits, new tools can also inhibit designers' creativity or cause time inefficiency if used in the wrong context. Thus, understanding which tools to use and when during the design process is increasingly necessary to ensure the best use of resources in design practice. Existing research on understanding the performance of design tools and the resulting frameworks for comparing tools are either specific to certain tools or highly generalised making evaluation across different design tools challenging. As such, this paper reports the creation of a more comprehensive framework of design tool characteristics to facilitate a better understanding of design tools and their uses. Demonstration of application of the framework is also given in the form of a case study on the use of Digital Sketching and its comparable tools with four practising designers. In conclusion, we show how the Design Tool Characteristics (DTCs) framework is an effective way to understand design tools, with further implications for design tool development.

The context of product development can be understood as transformation of needs into technical solutions under the continuous handling of uncertainties. These result particularly in early development phases from a lack of technical knowledge. In order to counter the uncertainties, companies are increasingly implementing agile approaches, which mostly originate in the area of software development. Although these are suitable for flexible handling of project management activities and lead to an increased reactivity of the development team, they do not address the early and continuous integration of technical knowledge into the process. With the aim of optimizing mechatronic systems with regard to their lightweight design potentials, in this article a method is developed that supports agile development with the goal of lightweight design. Therefore, it combines a method for functional modelling with a function-based lightweight design method. The targeted integration of technical knowledge has shown that lightweight design potentials can be optimized iteratively in agile approaches. As an initial validation, the applicability of the method was demonstrated in a development project.

Situatedness in design suggest that designing is situated within the design process or the cognitive actions taken by the designer, the designer's expertise and know-how, the designer's experience generally and the interactions in the specific design task being undertaken as well as the interactions with the design artefact generated. In this paper, we analyzed the situatedness of design concepts generated by teams of professional engineers during a design task. The method combines protocol analysis, Natural Language Processing and network theory to provide a representation and a measurement of design situatedness overtime. Providing empirical evidence of the situatedness of concepts has been overlooked in design research. The method and results presented in this paper outlines the foundation to empirically explore design situatedness.

Textual idea data from online crowdsourcing contains rich information of the concepts that underlie the original ideas and can be recombined to generate new ideas. But representing such information in a way that can stimulate new ideas is not a trivial task, because crowdsourced data are often vast and in unstructured natural languages. This paper introduces a method that uses natural language processing to summarize a massive number of idea descriptions and represents the underlying concept space as word clouds with a core-periphery structure to inspire recombinations of such concepts into new ideas. We report the use of this method in a real public-sector-sponsored project to explore ideas for future transportation system design. Word clouds that represent the concept space underlying original crowdsourced ideas are used as ideation aids and stimulate many new ideas with varied novelty, usefulness and feasibility. The new ideas suggest that the proposed method helps expand the idea space. Our analysis of these ideas and a survey with the designers who generated them shed light on how people perceive and use the word clouds as ideation aids and suggest future research directions.

The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to activate spontaneous and immediate users’ reactions are considered the outcome of good design practice.

A huge effort has been made by researchers for understanding affordances: yet these efforts have been somewhat elusive. In particular, they have been limited to case studies and experimental studies, usually involving a small subset of affordances. No systematic effort has been carried out to list all known affordance effects. This paper offers preliminary steps for such an ambitious effort.

We propose a set of three different approaches of Natural Language Processing techniques to be used to extract meaningful affordance information from the full text of patents: 1) a simple word search, 2) a lexicon of affordances and 3) a rule-based system.

The results give in-depth measures of how rare affordances in patents are, and a fine grain analysis of the linguistical construction of affordances. Finally, we show an interesting output of our method, that has detected affordances for disabled people, showing the ability of our system to automatically collect design-relevant knowledge.

Prototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

Design method validation is an important research activity in method development. But the design method's applicability is often left out in validation, although it is a necessary step and it enables further validation steps. Currently, there is a lack of support for the assessment of design method applicability. We present an approach to provide support for iterative studies on three aspects of design method applicability. We evaluate the approach in a single case study. In the study, we investigate the applicability of a method for model building in analysis, in three iterative steps of the approach. Application of the approach produced valuable insights on the method applicability. The results show how aspects of applicability can be assessed using the presented approach. Therefore, the approach can contribute to the standardisation of design method validation, especially for early stages of validation, which is currently discussed in the community.

With the rapid development of digital technologies, products connectivity is increasing as well as the data produced and collected. Forecasts on product development predict that this trend will keep on growing. In this context, new design solutions based on data are emerging. Those data-driven design approaches are common for identifying the customers' need when developing a new product. However, few studies cover data-driven design in the other early stages of product design. Thus, the research question addressed in this paper is: what are the challenges of data-driven design research in the early phases of the product development process? Through a literature review and a workshop proposed at the conference DESIGN 2020, this paper offers a first glimpse of future research leads. A list of 5 challenges for data-driven design in the early stages of product design is proposed and ranked from short term to long term.

Resilient systems have the capability to survive and recover from seriously affecting events. Resilience engineering already is established for socio-economic organisations and extended network-like structures e. g. supply systems like power grids. Transferring the known principles and concepts used in these disciplines enables engineering resilient load-carrying systems and subsystems, too. Unexpected load conditions or component damages are summarised as disruptions caused by nesciense that may cause damages to the system or even system breakdowns. Disruptions caused by nescience can be controlled by analysing the resilience characteristics and synthesising resilient load-carrying systems. This paper contributes to a development methodology for resilient load-carrying systems by presenting a resilience applications model to support engineers analysing system resilience characteristics and behaviour. Further a concept of a systematically structured solution catalogue is provided that can be used for the classification of measures to realise resilience functions depending on system adaptivity and disruption progress. The resilience characteristics are illustrated by 3 examples.

This paper explores the notion of mentored reflective practice to describe design studio pedagogy. Students learn how to design by doing design in the studio. Design critiques are a key element in design studio pedagogy as they capture a moment where students get feedback from their tutors on their designs. The research questions addressed concern the roles of each participant during design studio reviews and their interactions with design representations. The protocol analysis methodology and the Function Behavior Structure ontology are utilized to convey our case study analysis.

In “Grande cuisine” creation and tradition co-evolve in a rich number of ways. Great chefs still use recipes from the 19th century and may also reinvent gastronomy itself. The creation heritage of culinary Art is the paradoxical capacity to both “respect” tradition and “break” its rules. Building on C-K theory, we show that such creative heritage needs multiple and independent layers of knowledge that “speak” of basic fixed objects. These properties correspond to general mathematical structures that we find in Topos theory. Thus, C-K/Topos predicts creative design strategies that can respect tradition in different ways. It also proves a form of “innovation within tradition” - “sheafification” in Topos words- that is not a compromise and builds on tradition itself. These findings fit with the lessons of great books of gastronomy. C-K/Topos has a wide scope of validity: it applies to any innovative design that needs preserving systemic structures, like engineering systems or social and environmental systems. C- K/Topos models with a high generality how local and radical innovation can warrant systems incremental change. C-K/Topos will have implications for teaching and research.

Mass-personalization (MP) presents an opportunity to meet diversifying customer needs in consumer products market with a near mass-production efficiency. Traditional product development methodologies fall short to guide design for MP and a dedicated systematic methodology is essential. The proposed approach bases on a dynamic product template that automatically adapts with user input and produces a reliable output. This paper presents the workflow towards mass-personalization of saxophone mouthpieces with focus on design automation.