Originally developed for the software industry, agile development is being applied in the hardware field nowadays as well due to its benefits when having to deal with volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions. However, certain complications arise when applying the concept of agility in the hardware. In this publication, based on the challenges identified by Ovesen in 2012, the current challenges of agile development for hardware are gathered using an embedded design approach, ensuring its actuality based on the latest surveys and empirical data. The current state regarding the challenges is displayed and its interrelations as well as their advancements compared to seven years ago is discussed. Moreover, an attempt to explain the difficulties of applying agile development is given by a hardware-related complexity model.

In recent years, the air transport market has quickly grown, creating new civil aircrafts demand, challenging the actual production rate of aerospace industries. The bottleneck of the current civil aircrafts production rate lies in the capability of the manufacturing and assembly facilities in relation to the aircrafts architecture design.

The aim of this work is to develop a methodology and a related mathematical model that can be used at the conceptual design phase for the assessment of criticalities related to the product assemblability. The methodology allows to recognize modules and/or interfaces which are mostly affecting the assembly time providing a design tool for the comparison and evaluation of product architecture alternatives.

A preliminary application has been done on the nose-fuselage of a civil aircraft for passenger transport. The test case provides interesting outcome in the identification of modules and module interfaces which are strongly affecting the assembly phase and required a re-arrangement (new architecture design) for the process improvement.

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.

The paper presents a systematic literature review investigating definitions, uses, and application of data-driven design in the concept development process. The analysis shows a predominance of the use of text mining techniques on social media and online reviews to identify customers’ needs, not exploiting the opportunity granted by the increased accessibility of IoT in cyber-physical systems. The paper argues that such a gap limits the potential of capturing tacit customers’ needs and highlights the need to proactively plan and design for a transition toward data-driven design.

The interest in the Circular Economy (CE) has grown in recent years. Digital technologies (DTs) have demonstrated a potential synergy to achieve circular goals at the micro, meso, and macro-level. Although several studies in literature explore DTs and CE linkage, they have not been identified according to their primary research themes. This paper aims to identify the main research streams addressing CE and DTs. From a Systematic Literature Review and Content Analysis, we reviewed 40 articles and classified three primary research streams. (1) Industry 4.0 (I4.0) focuses on the relevance and role of I4.0 in the transition to a CE. (2) The Business research stream evaluated the connection between digital transformation and business. (3) The Sustainability research stream discusses sustainability issues such as waste management and smart cities. Based on the analyzed studies' purposes and gaps, we provide a research agenda for further research. Additionally, we explain the implications of DTs and CE to research on engineering design. Our paper guides researchers in their future research to focus on gaps that have not been answered and position their studies according to their research streams.

Driven by networked Electronic Health Record systems, Artificial Intelligence, real-time data from wearable devices with an overlay of invisible user interfaces and improved analytics, Health 4.0 is changing the healthcare industry. The focus on collaboration, coherence, and convergence that will make healthcare more predictive and personalised. Furthermore, Health 4.0 realises the value of data more consistently and effectively. It can pinpoint areas of improvement and enable more informed decisions. What it also does is help move the entire healthcare industry from a system that is reactive and focused on fee-for-service to a system that is value-based, which measures outcomes and ensures proactive prevention.

In this paper, the authors will first explore the realm of the emerging area of Health 4.0 and identify its opportunities and challenges. This includes understanding the relevant base technologies as well as the design principles for the realization of smart healthcare product, systems and product-service-systems of the future. Following on from there, the authors focus on the role of design in the specific context of healthcare.

One of the most promising trends in healthcare digitalisation is the personalisation and individualisation of therapy based on virtual representations of the human body through Human Digital Twins (HDTs). Despite the growing number of articles on HDTs, to-date no consensus on how to design such systems exists. A systematic literature review for designing HDTs used for behaviour-changing therapy and rehabilitation resulted in eight key design considerations across four themes: regulatory and ethical, transparency and trust, dynamism and flexibility, and behaviour and cognitive mechanisms.

Intelligent manufacturing (IM) embraces Industry 4.0 design principles to advance autonomy and increase manufacturing efficiency. However, many IM systems are created ad hoc, which limits the potential for generalizable design principles and operational guidelines. This work offers a standardizing framework for integrated job scheduling and navigation control in an autonomous mobile robot driven shop floor, an increasingly common IM paradigm. We specifically propose a multi-agent framework involving mobile robots, machines, humans. Like any cyberphysical system, the performance of IM systems is influenced by the construction of the underlying software platforms and the choice of the constituent algorithms. In this work, we demonstrate the use of reinforcement learning on a sub-system of the proposed framework and test its effectiveness in a dynamic scenario. The case study demonstrates collaboration amongst robots to maximize throughput and safety on the shop floor. Moreover, we observe nuanced behavior, including the ability to autonomously compensate for processing delays, and machine and robot failures in real time.

3D printed heterogeneous lattice structures are beam-and-node based structures characterised by a variable geometry. This variability is obtained starting from a periodic structure and modifying the relative density of the unit cells or by combining unit cells having different shapes. While several consolidated design approaches are described to implement the first approach, there are still computational issues to be addressed to combine different cells properly. In this paper, we describe a preliminary experimental study focused on exploring the design issues to be addressed as well as the advantages that this second type of heterogeneous structures could provide. The Three-Point-Bending test was used to compare the behaviour of different types of heterogeneous structures printed using the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology. Results demonstrated that the possibility of combining multiple unit cells represents a valid strategy for performing a more effective tuning of the material distribution within the design space. However, further studies are necessary to explore the behaviour of these structures and develop guidelines for helping designers in exploiting their potential.

Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) confronts traditional design practice. Instead of reproducing and reinforcing contemporary perceptions of products and services, SCD seeks to change them, with the goal to spur a public debate e.g. on what is a preferable societal development. SCD methods comprise among others speculative narratives and design of critical objects. However, the theoretical fundament of SCD is feeble, and concepts and methods are upheld of mere examples.

The article aims to present the features, methods, and practice of SCD, and locate it in the design field. Following the introduction, section 2 presents features and SCD methods and practices. Section 3 links SCD to traditional design and identifies benefits and challenges relating to its role as a supplement to today's design practice. The final section suggests topics for further SCD research.

The article benefits designers in search for alternatives to commercially oriented design approaches. Findings indicate that SCD can contribute to creating new societal roles for designers, foster innovation in the relationship between designers and users, and encourage creativity through imaginative aesthetics.

Prototypes are a common feature of many product design and development endeavours. An ever widening range of prototyping options are available to designers and engineers. May particular options be superior to others, or more appropriate for particular endeavours? This paper reviews current literature on the nature of what constitutes a prototype and the benefits they offer to the discipline. They principally facilitate communication, aid learning, help gain and provide feedback, inform decision making and generally provide superior design outcomes. In order to determine if any particular manner of prototype is preferable for achieving these benefits a comparative study of some of the contemporary prototyping methods is subsequently conducted: A 3D printed prototype (physical prototype), a CAD prototype (represented using a computer monitor), an augmented reality prototype (represented using a tablet device) and a virtual reality prototype (represented using a stereo projector and polarised glasses). The results indicate that while all provide benefits, overall the physical prototype performs best and the augmented reality prototype performs most poorly.

This paper reviews the literature on risk management practices and methods in product design and development. Based on an expert workshop by the Risk Management Processes and Methods in Design Special Interest Group within the Design Society and literature review, three key areas are discussed: risk identification, assessment, and mitigation. In each area, researchers have described practices that are used in product development organizations, proposed new methods to support risk management processes and decision-making, and generated evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of these activities.

There have been growing uses of semantic networks in the past decade, such as leveraging large-scale pre-trained graph knowledge databases for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks in engineering design research. Therefore, the paper provides a survey of the research that has employed semantic networks in the engineering design research community. The survey reveals that engineering design researchers have primarily relied on WordNet, ConceptNet, and other common-sense semantic network databases trained on non-engineering data sources to develop methods or tools for engineering design. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts to mine large scale technical publication and patent databases to construct engineering-contextualized semantic network databases, e.g., B-Link and TechNet, to support NLP in engineering design. On this basis, we recommend future research directions for the construction and applications of engineering-related semantic networks in engineering design research and practice.

Artificial intelligence (AI) capable of generating images from a text prompt are becoming increasingly prevalent in society and design. The general public can use their computers and mobile devices to ask a complex text-to-image AI to create an image which is in some cases indistinguishable from that which a human could create using a computer graphics package. These images are shared on social media and have been used in the creation of art projects, documents and publications. This exploratory study aimed to identify if modern text-to-image AI (Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Disco Diffusion) could be used to replace the designer in the concept generation stage of the design process. Teams of design students were asked to evaluate AI generated concepts from 15 to a final concept. The outcomes of this research are a first of its kind for the field of engineering design, in the identification of barriers in the use of current text-to-image AI for the purpose of engineering design. The discussion suggests how this can be overcome in the short term and what knowledge the research community needs to build to overcome these barriers in the long term.

We introduce the concept of social sustainability, intertwined with ecological and economic aspects, to the field of service robots and comparable automation technology. It takes a first step towards a comprehensive guideline that operationalizes and applies social sustainability. By applying this guideline to the project MURMEL we offer a concept that collects and rates social key issues to visualize their individual importance. Social sustainability is an important and often overlooked aspect of sustainable technology development which should be considered in the early development phase.

Maier and Fadel pioneered Affordance-Based Design (ABD) based on Gibson's revolutionary theory of affordances and Norman's deployment of the concept in his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”. Gibson (1979) introduced the affordance concept into the discipline of Ecological Psychology to address the interactions between an object and an agent. The Ecological approach includes the direct perception of affordances for the user along with a consideration of the users’ biomechanics. However, as the concept of affordance was imported and utilized in different disciplines, including engineering design, some important aspects of Ecological theory were omitted.

This paper is an attempt to review the definitions and different utilizations of the affordance concept focusing on the design of usable products to identify the different views and the missing elements. After addressing the divergent viewpoints of affordances, we provide recommendations to improve the usability aspects in ABD by considering direct perception and ergonomics. We claim that a design (based on affordances) that fails to address both criteria may result in a product that is less usable.

A Digital Twin as a virtual representation of a physical system is becoming a key technology. While potential benefits are evident, there is no approach in literature or practice comprehensively supporting its introduction. In an industrial case study, a generic procedure model for the conception and implementation of a Digital Twin was developed. The relations between use cases, usage data, and virtual models resulted in a target concept as well as requirements for the implementation. Thereby, companies can access the potentials of a Digital Twin taking into account their specific situation.

With the surging number of digital devices penetrating our daily routines, the risks inherent to cybersecurity—the protection of data on digital products connected to the Internet—have also increased since these devices (e.g., connected home devices, personal monitoring) collect, process, analyze and store users’ sensitive personal information. Thus, there is a pressing need to assist users in being aware of and dealing with potential cybersecurity threats. With the proposition that fulfilling the need starts with developing an in-depth understanding of the user behaviors in the context of cybersecurity, an exploratory study was conducted that employed three mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods—a trend analysis, an interview study, and an online survey study. The paper reports the user characteristics on (1) awareness levels of cybersecurity issues, (2) uses of digital devices, and (3) means of dealing with the privacy issues in product use. The results of the studies were translated into eight personas that systematically reflect distinct characteristics of users, which can help designers empathize with their potential users vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.

Many cities have announced ambitious plans to introduce zero-emission electric bus systems. The transformation process to electric bus systems opens up a vast design space as different charging strategies, charging technologies and battery types are available. Therefore, a profound assessment strategy is necessary to find a “most suitable system solution” under given strategic and operational requirements.

In this study, we present a new methodology for conceptual design of urban electric bus systems. First, the available e-bus technologies are analysed with a special focus on charging systems, battery technology and aging. Relational functional analysis is used to derive a suitable simulation model. Based on the operational requirements, an energetic simulation of the e-bus is carried out, and the required battery capacity is obtained. Subsequently, the design space is reduced by applying a qualitative cost- technology compatibility matrix taking cost and battery aging into account. The applicability of the model is shown for an exemplary realistic operational scenario to identify three most expedient concepts, which are finally validated with an in-depth analysis.

The advancements in the field of VR allow designers to use VR as a technology for sketching ideas in a virtual space. In this paper, Gravity Sketch (a VR sketching software) is used as an ideation sketching tool in the process of product styling. The goal of this research is to examine the advantages and points-of-pain when using virtual reality tools in the process of product styling. 29 Master students used the VR sketching tool in their design process and all of them had feedback and insights on the tool.