This paper examines some aspects of physical-digital workspaces, focusing on multi-user, multi-touch technologies and how different workspaces impact collaboration. We introduce the concept of globally collaborative work. We chose to use case studies completed by groups of students in an engineering course to test different workspace modalities: the use of a large multi-touch table top in conjunction with a multi-touch board (vertical), the use of tablets with the multi-touch board, and finally the multi-touch board alone. The evaluation criteria are based on modes of interaction which emerge during globally collaborative work sessions: individual work, communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. We hypothesized that the workspaces would influence collaborative activity, expecting to see higher rates of collaboration in the table top environment than in the other two modalities studied. However, results showed less co-building and more cooperative work, as students divided their work and later attempted to negotiate a coherent product built on individual contributions. Lastly, we share a few design recommendations based on these results.

Although Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments (LCSA) are important in evaluating the sustainability of complex products and services, there is no sufficient support for engineers performing LCSA. The concept of an Engineering Graph focuses on the relations of data within engineering. It provides a model that leverages existing data in engineering and extendibility to include specialized databases and open and public data from the semantic web. This paper proposes a concept of how Engineering Graphs can be used to address the issues of LCSA and support engineers.

Throughout the course of product experience, a user employs multiple senses, including vision, hearing, and touch. Previous cross-modal studies have shown that multiple senses interact with each other and change perceptions. In this paper, we propose a methodology for designing multisensory product experiences by applying cross-modal effect to simultaneous stimuli. In this methodology, we first obtain a model of the comprehensive cognitive structure of user's multisensory experience by applying Kansei modeling methodology and extract opportunities of cross-modal effect from the structure. Second, we conduct experiments on these cross-modal effects and formulate them by obtaining a regression curve through analysis. Finally, we find solutions to improve the product sensory experience from the regression model of the target cross-modal effects. We demonstrated the validity of the methodology with SLR cameras as a case study, which is a typical product with multisensory perceptions.

This paper aims to identify factors that influence creativity, and strives towards understanding the effect of representations, namely abstract and concrete design outcomes. Three conditions are compared; a control group, an abstract group, and a group provided with various example solutions. The implications of this work can strongly impact the formulation of design briefs, where the goal is to stimulate the creativity of design brief outcomes and examine their relationship to product awareness.

The aim of our study was to use Kansei Engineering Evaluation to examine the renewal of old buildings with sustainability and innovation by comparing to new buildings. First, we conducted a questionnaire survey, with 84 participants, on 18 buildings from Asian and European countries; the survey used 16 adjectives. Second, we studied the characteristics of new and renewed old buildings in terms of the elements crucial to sustainable and innovative design. The results suggest that the adaptive reuse of old buildings in more sustainable than constructing new buildings. Further, the adjectives preferred by the survey show that the adaptive reuse of old buildings has higher influence with character of “creative” from the innovation viewpoint. This paper presents a project to address sustainability and innovation of adaptive reused of old building at a later stage. This study contributes to the renewal of existing infrastructure to improve its longevity and chance of future reuse, and to ensure environmental sustainability for future society.

The goal in system-level design is to generate a diverse set of high-performing design configurations that allow trade-offs across different objectives and avoid early concretization. We use deep generative models to learn a manifold of the valid design space, followed by Monte Carlo sampling to explore and optimize design over the learned manifold, producing a diverse set of optimal designs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach on the design of an SAE race vehicle and propeller.

Since decades, researchers are developing methods, tools, and processes for the development of mechatronic systems. In the last decade, this field has widened, including, amongst others, aspects such as cyber-physical systems (CPS) or the internet of things (IoT). Still, little concrete guidance can be identified for engineers who have to decide whether to realize a certain product function mechanically, electronically, through software functions, or with combinations thereof. The goal of the paper is to contribute to the development of guidelines for design engineers in which domain (or in which combination of domains and other areas) to allocate the solution for an engineering problem.

To be successful in innovation, organisations need to be dynamically adaptable to novel situations to avoid getting ‘left behind’. Yet, they face vast uncertainties stemming from unforeseeable technological shifts or future user and market behaviour, making strategic decision-making on innovation an extremely difficult task. Decision-makers thus increasingly try to control or shape the future, rather than foresee it. This includes thinking ahead and generating potential pathways that will make an innovation viable. This captures the essence of designerly ways of thinking in reasoning toward ‘what might be’. Extant literature has been reviewed that discusses alternative strategies how this future-oriented thinking can be applied to become better at selecting novel ideas for development. We observe parallels between divergent thinking, abductive reasoning, analogising and lateral thinking suggested by different authors in this process. The paper continues to propose how these key mechanisms can be embedded within an existing framework for decision-making under uncertainty, the ‘OODA Loop’, which has seen increasing uptake in such decision-making scenarios.

When using additive manufacturing processes, the choice of the numerous settings for the process and design parameters significantly influences the build and production time. To reduce the required build time, it is useful to adapt the parameters with the greatest influence. However, since the contribution of the individual parameters is not readily apparent, a sensible choice of process and design parameters can become a challenging task.

Thus, the following article presents a method, that enables the product developer to determine the main contributors to the required build time of additively manufactured products. By using this sensitivity analysis method, the contributors of the individual parameters can be analyzed for a given parametrized CAD model with the help of an analysis-based build time estimation approach. The novelty of the contribution can be found in providing a method that allows studying both design and process parameters simultaneously, taking the machine to be used into account. The exemplary application of the presented method to a sample part manufactured by Fused Deposition Modeling demonstrates its benefits and applicability.

The aim of this paper is to examine the current state of research on tolerance-induced costs in Germany. Through a literature research already existing approaches for the determination of costs related to tolerances during the specification of technical components are pointed out and possible approaches for the reduction of these costs are presented. In addition, the actuality of these approaches will be considered. One question that is supposed to be answered here is to what state of standard for the specification of components these approaches can be assigned to. On the other hand, it should be clarified whether the existing approaches are applicable to the currently valid standard system of the Geometrical Product Specification (GPS).

Can the economic efficiency of the specifications selected for tolerancing be determined in a technical drawing during the product development process in accordance with GPS on the basis of the current state of research?

Understanding and applying consumers' needs in product development is key to success across various industries. The failure rate of new products, however, remains high because consumer demands are not adequately addressed. To investigate the role of consumers in the product development processes of small ventures, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 40 packaged food and beverage small ventures in California and Finland. Our findings showed that consumers rarely drove the design of new products, but rather functioned as a source of validation or feedback for small improvements of existing products. Consumer feedback was often unstructured and concentrated in the latter stages of the product development process. However, even though customer involvement in the small ventures' product development was more restricted than recommended in cocreation literature their influence still brought meaningful changes to the products. Given the small ventures' lack of resources, future research on creative, low-cost ways to co-create is called for.

This study explores how two global brands (Starbucks and IKEA) design spatial experiences that are localised for diverse cultural contexts. Through a series of interviews with store designers, design and marketing managers, and brand experts from both companies, we identify two different ways a brand and design team can be organized and how each influences the process of the localisation of spatial experiences. Our findings highlight issues related to a team's structure, the use of different design processes and how these influence the building of strong, locally relevant spatial experiences.

The requirements on validity for studies in design research are very high. Therefore, this paper aims at identifying challenges that occur when setting up studies and suggests solution strategies to address them. Three different institutes combining their experience discussed several studies in a workshop. Resulting main challenges are to find a suitable task, to operationalise the variables and to deal with a high analysis effort per participant. Automation in data evaluation and a detailed practical guideline on studies in design research are considered necessary.

The use of product-service systems business models is increasing in today's economy. Because the products that provide the service to the customers incur cost during their lifetime, the method of lifecycle costing finds wide-spread use. However, this paper shows the current methods have some inaccuracies when determining lifecycle costs. The methods do not consider the required number of products necessary to provide the offered service to the customers. This paper describes a new framework for lifecycle costing that includes these cost components.

The development of a new motor can be a high effort. In this paper, Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is applied to model the second generation of an electronic compact actuator (ECA). This paper focuses on the traceability between model elements from previous product generations. By integrating the approach of the PGE - Product Generation Engineering in MBSE, developers can store more relevant information in the model; they can accomplish automatic calculations of derived factors and build models more efficiently in further product developments.

Revolutionary changes of a VUCA-world are effecting more and more industries. Focusing the automotive industry, this is caused by several new trends in technology or market. This situation is requiring high flexibility and is questioning for sustainability as well as resilience in system development projects. This publication represents results out of a survey, part of a wider research. The objective is the development of a process orientated method for risk and technical change management. The survey is conducted by participants of transdisciplinary system development in automotive industry. Topics questioned are VUCA, complexity, (re-)action, quality and module interfaces of Generic Systems Engineering. The results demonstrate the participants’ experience and demands for sustainable and resilient system development projects. In conclusion, this report provides information on the considering elements to develop a process orientated method for risk and technical change management in automotive industry.

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.

There has been a growing recognition that a systems thinking approach, which pays attention to the entire dynamic system, its constituent parts and the interactions among those parts, is an effective approach for tackling complex issues that exhibit nonlinear behaviour and involve multiple stakeholders. To understand a complex system, a systems thinking approach must identify the leverage points, which are non-intuitive and difficult to identify. This paper proposes a design tool called System Design Canvas, which supports the identification of system variables and leverage points from technological sensing data and human data while understanding stakeholders' mental model. The present case study confirms that System Design Canvas can identify system variables and leverage points that are required for the current agricultural system in Cambodia.

Variety management is a cross-domain issue in product family design. In the real field, the relationships across the domains are so complex for most of the existing product families that they cannot be easily identified without proper reference architecture. This reference architecture should provide the cross- domain mapping mechanisms in an explicit manner and be able to identify the proper units for management. From this perspective of cross-domain framework, this paper introduces development architecture (DA) to describe the relationships between elements in market, design, and production domains and to give insights for the cross-domain variety management in the product development stage. DA has three parts: (1) the arrangement of elements in each domain, (2) the mapping between elements, and (3) the identification of management sets and key interfaces which are the proper units for variety management. The proposed development architecture framework is applied to the case of front chassis family of modules of an automobile.

Polygon meshes and particularly triangulated meshes can be used to describe the shape of different types of geometry such as bicycles, bridges, or runways. In engineering, such polygon meshes can occur as finite element meshes, resulting from topology optimization or laser scanning. This article presents an automated parameterization of polygon meshes into a parametric representation using subdivision surfaces, especially in topology optimization. Therefore, we perform surface skeletonization on a volumetric grid supported by the Euclidian distance transformation and topology preserving and shape-preserving criterion. Based on that surface skeleton, an automated conversation into a Subdivision Surface Control grid is established. The final mid-surface-like parametrization is quite flexible and can be changed by variating the control gird or the local thickness.