This study exhibits that there exists generative ethics in which ethical thinking will allow us to change our perspectives to consider the artifacts’ social effects in design, thereby enhancing our activity to generate novel and practical design ideas.

As an example of practicing the generative ethics, a case for addressing the increasing requirement to properly introduce “artificial intelligence” (AI) systems in society was considered. We applied the ethical design theory to promote the practice of ethical AI design by engineers. To achieve this, we implemented a creativity support tool that can be used based on the knowledge base of AI ethics.

To confirm the validity of the theory and the tool, we conducted user experiments in which the AI research students had to consider the effects of their own research projects with using the tool. We could confirm that the tool actually induced the users to consider social impacts. Some students revealed in response to the questionnaire that the experiment provided them with an opportunity to reconsider their own research theme.

In this study, the ethical design theory and tool will be briefly reviewed, and the experiments will be discussed.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a versatile technology that could add flexibility in manufacturing processes, whether implemented alone or along other technologies. This technology enables on-demand production and decentralized production networks, as production facilities can be located around the world to manufacture products closer to the final consumer (decentralized manufacturing). However, the wide adoption of additive manufacturing technologies is hindered by the lack of experience on its implementation, the lack of repeatability among different manufacturers and a lack of integrated production systems. The later, hinders the traceability and quality assurance of printed components and limits the understanding and data generation of the AM processes and parameters. In this article, a design strategy is proposed to integrate the different phases of the development process into a model-based design platform for decentralized manufacturing. This platform is aimed at facilitating data traceability and product repeatability among different AM machines. The strategy is illustrated with a case study where a car steering knuckle is manufactured in three different facilities in Sweden and Italy.

Product-service systems (PSS) are being increasingly employed as opportunities to keep innovating. The design of PSS value propositions should focus on the value visualization for stakeholders. However, the PSS representations are still oriented to the customer’ perspective and focus on a process or technological role. This study aims to represent the PSS value proposition in a structured-diagram adapted from the journey map method in combination with the use of the elements of value. A case research was conducted with a high-tech agricultural start-up for representing its value proposition by following a process founded in the practices of journey mapping. Qualitative data analysis was employed to associate the elements of value with the solution, and to verify the consistency of the results. The representation enables the visualization of the stakeholders’ perception regarding the content of the solution as well as the potential value that may be related to it. The experience-centric perspective derived from the journey map associated with the value-related information provides a richer view of the PSS value proposition, which can lead to reflections regarding the solution.

Materials experience in design involves the meanings that materials convey to users through its expressive characteristics. Such meaning evoking patterns are influenced by parameters such as context, product (e.g.shape) and user. Consequently, there is a need to standardise experiential material characterisation and large-scale data collection, by means of a meaning-less or ‘neutral’ demonstrator to objectively compare materials.

This paper explores the conception of this neutrality and proposes two opposing strategies: neutrality through complexity or through simplicity. In a pre-study with 20 designers, six associative pairs are selected as neutrality criteria, and shaped in 240 forms by 20 (non) designers in a main workshop. Following the simplicity strategy, these forms are averaged out in three steps by a team of five designers, based on a consensus on of delicate-rugged, aggressive-calm, futuristic-calm, masculine-feminine, traditional-modern, and toylike-professional, resulting in a selection of four averaged neutral forms.

Finally, future research will focus on complexity to increase interactivity, so that consumers might be triggered in extensive material exploration.

In this study, we discuss a structure for developing the skills and competencies required by the learning framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for future education. Given the broad range of skills and the numerous competencies required to meet the demands of future society, the proposed wider and higher-level framework is based on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and design, and mathematics) and addresses the limitations of conventional computational thinking by tackling some of the skills and competencies. This is done by proposing the enrichment of STEAM educational approach with art thinking, which may be defined as a creative human-centred discovery process. To explore such enrichment, we conducted a workshop on art thinking. The motivation of the workshop was to explore whether art thinking can overcome some of the limitations of computational thinking regarding future education in the OECD learning framework. We discuss STEAM as focusing on design creativity competency, and we outline the development of educational activities such as workshops to promote competencies in the perspective of OECD framework.

Components of modern systems are characterised by differing lifetimes. The resulting lifetime heterogeneity (LTH) is a core criteria to determine life cycle options (LCO) for more sustainable products, e.g. by upgrading or reuse. Estimating the lifetimes is challenged by a lack of suitable degradation models (DM) describing the detrimental change performance of components during the use phase. This paper expands the state of the art in LCO selection by a method to evaluate fitness and sensitivity of DM based on the similarity of use cases, environments and operation profiles of the system.

The use of serious games is more and more popular in the medical filed, mainly for home-based rehabilitation therapy. In this context, some design principles were already proposed. Designing serious game for evolution diseases assessment is challenging and necessitates a new approach of this principles. Working with physiotherapists at the origin of the Motor Function Measurement assessment scale, the development of a dedicated serious game is proposed based on new contextual principles.

Intercultural interactions encourage social inclusion and diversity, but they are often avoided due to prejudices. Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) can overcome such prejudices; still, the literature lacks guidelines on how to promote them by Design. In this study, we propose eight design strategies to facilitate these interactions, which were originated by bridging four theories for prejudice reduction and exemplar IMSI experiences of 15 intercultural participants. This paper presents the strategies and discusses their use to inspire new design concepts for promoting IMSI.

In the age of the fourth industrial revolution, the competition between enterprises is fierce to operate efficiently and hold on to their customers. Due to lack of time and methodology, many leaders struggle to establish optimized strategies for their businesses. To do so, the key processes need to be measured using dashboards that proactively help decisions making, facilitate the strategy execution and keep the employees focused. The purpose of this article is to identify the design features of a risk analysis dashboard and their effects on the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness.

This research focuses on evaluating a user interface (UI) for an autonomous vehicle (AV) with the goal to determine the most suitable layout for persons with visual acuity loss. The testing procedure includes a Wizard of Oz AV for simulating an automated ride. Several participants are included in the study and the visual impairments are simulated by specially designed glasses. The conclusions help to determine the optimal graphic design of the UI that can be independently used by persons with blurred vision. The results can be applied to improve the inclusiveness and ergonomics of vehicle UIs.

An early evaluation of a product along with the consideration of life phase specific actor(s) and environment(s) can help greatly to gain an understanding of the product's behaviour and interactions. Virtual Reality (VR) can help designers to examine later life situations of a product by means of use case scenarios. However, preparing a VR-scene is still a time-consuming and cumbersome task. A model based approach that uses behaviour models of SysML to describe a VR-scene can reduce the preparation efforts. Such an approach is helpful if it allows the reuse of already described VR-scenes or their contents. This paper talks about the reusability of SysML behaviour models that constitute a VR-scene. This reusability can only be achieved by the generic definition of model interfaces. Therefore, a new modelling approach is presented to facilitate the reuse of SysML behaviour models to form different use cases of a product in VR. This approach also talks about the interface definitions and the management of variants of SysML models. The presented approach is elaborated by an example model that contains variants and uses instances to build different use cases.

As digitization progresses, the integration of information and communication technologies in technical systems is constantly increasing. Fascinating value potentials are emerging (e.g. autonomous driving), but also challenges in the system development. The constantly increasing product complexity and degree of networking require a systemic development, which is fulfilled by established approaches of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). To ensure the reliability of tomorrow's systems, an integrative and early consideration of security and safety is additionally required. In order to show the possibility and consequences of failures and attacks, the paper develops a modeling language that links established and partly isolated security and safety approaches within a consistent metamodel. The developer is enabled to synthesize system architectures transparently on an interdisciplinary level and to analyze attack and failure propagation integratively. The approach uncovers synergetic and especially contrasting goals and effects of architectural designs in terms of safety and security in order to make adequate architectural decisions based on trade-off analyses.

Combinatorial Design such as configuration design, design optioneering, component selection, and generative design, is common across engineering. Generating solutions for a combinatorial design task often involves the application of classical computing solvers that can either map or navigate design spaces. However, it has been observed that classical computing resource power-law scales with many design space models. This observation suggests classical computing may not be capable of modelling our future design space needs.

To meet future design space modelling needs, this paper examines quantum computing and the characteristics that enables its resources to scale polynomially with design space size. The paper then continues to present a combinatorial design problem that is subsequently represented, constrained and solved by quantum computing. The results of which are the derivation of an initial set of circuits that represent design space constraints. The study shows the game-changing possibilities of quantum computing as an engineering design tool and is the start of an exciting new journey for design research.

Bio-inspired design (BID) involves generating innovative ideas for engineering design by drawing inspiration from natural biological phenomena and systems, using a form of design-by-analogy. Despite its many successes, BID approaches encounter research challenges including unstructured data and existing models that hinder comprehension and processing, limited focus on finding biological knowledge compared to defined problems, and insufficient guidance of the ideation process with algorithms. This paper proposes a knowledge-based approach to address the challenges. The approach involves transforming unstructured data into structured knowledge, including information about natural sources, their benefits, and applications. The structured knowledge is then used to construct a semantic network, enabling designers to retrieve information for BID in two ways. Furthermore, a three-step ideation method is developed to encourage divergent thinking and explore additional potential solutions by drawing inspiration and utilizing knowledge. The knowledge-based BID approach is implemented as a tool and design cases are conducted to illustrate the process of applying this tool for BID.

Research funded projects are often concerned with the development of proof-of-concept products. Consequently, activities related to verification and validation testing (VVT) are often not considered in depth, even though various design iterations are carried out to refine an idea. Furthermore, the introduction of additive manufacturing (AM) has facilitated, in particular, the development of bespoke medical products. End bespoke products, which will be used by relevant stakeholders (e.g. patients and clinicians) are fabricated with the same manufacturing technologies used during prototyping. As a result, the detailed design stage of products fabricated by AM is much shorter. Therefore, to improve the market-readiness of bespoke medical devices, testing must be integrated within the development from an early stage, allowing better planning of resources. To address these issues, in this paper, a comprehensive VVT framework is proposed for research projects, which lack a VVT infrastructure. The framework builds up on previous studies and methods utilised in industry to enable project key experts to capture risks as early as the concept design stage.

Collaboration is common practice within design disciplines and beyond. Brainstorming, discussions, and prototyping tend to occur within the same physical space. The reduction of human interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these practices. In this paper, we focus on the possibilities and challenges of remote prototyping of four student teams by combining a double diamond approach with tools to overcome remote work challenges. The results were analyzed to understand crucial tools, advantages, and obstacles. The key challenges and opportunities were then identified and examined.

Design research as a field has been studied from diverse perspectives starting from product inception to their disposal. The product of these studies includes knowledge, tools, methods, processes, frameworks, approaches, and theories. The contexts of these studies are innumerable. The unit of these studies varies from individuals to organizations, using a variety of theoretical tools and methods that have fragmented the field, making it difficult to understand the map of this corpus of knowledge across this diversity.

In this paper, we propose a model-based approach that on the one hand, does not delve into the details of the design object itself, but on the other hand, unifies the description of design problem at another abstraction level. The use of this abstract framework allows for describing and comparing underlying models of published design studies using the same language to place them in the right context in which design takes place and to enable to inter-relate them, to understand the wholes and the parts of design studies.

Patterns of successful studies could be generated and used by researchers to improve the design of new studies, understand the outcome of existing studies, and plan follow-up studies.

This paper presents an EEG (Electroencephalography) study that explores the correlation between the EEG variation across design stages and the quality of the design outcomes. The brain activations of 33 volunteers with engineering backgrounds were recorded while performing a design task using a morphological table to develop an amphibious bike. The EEG variations from the analysing/selecting stage to the illustrating stage were analysed based on the EEG frequency band and channel sets. A significant correlation between the detail level of the design outcome and the power variation mode was observed in theta, alpha and gamma bands, each involving different channel sets. Compared to the assessment results from two evaluators, using EEG variations as a proxy of the detail level of the design outcome could reach a maximum accuracy of 0.727, precision of 0.765, and recall of 0.889. These results also provide suggestions on the selection of the frequency bands and channel sets to achieve better prediction performance according to each metric.

Enhancing the appearance of physical prototypes with digital elements, also known as mixed prototyping, has demonstrated to be a valuable approach in the product development process. However, the adoption is limited also due to the high time and competence required for authoring the digital contents. This paper presents a content authoring tool that aims to improve the user acceptance by reducing the specific competence required, which is needed for segmentation and UV mapping of the 3D model used to implement a mixed prototype. Part of the tasks related to 3D modelling software, in fact, has been transferred to simpler manual tasks applied onto the physical prototype. Moreover, the proposed tool can recognise these manual inputs thanks to a computer-vision algorithm and automatically manage the segmentation and UV mapping tasks, freeing time for the user in a task that otherwise would require complete engagement. To preliminarily evaluate effectiveness and potential of the tool, it has been used in a case study to build up the mixed prototype of a coffee machine. The result demonstrated that the tool can correctly segment the 3D model of a physical prototype in its relevant parts and generate their corresponding UV maps.

Structuring the early design phase of automotive systems is an important part of efficient and successful development processes. Today, safety considerations (e.g., the safety life cycle of ISO 26262) significantly affect the course of development. Preliminary designs are expressed in functional system architectures, which are required to form safety concepts. Thus, mapping tasks and work products to a reference process during early design stages is an important part of structuring the system development. This contribution describes the systematic creation and notation of the functional safety concept within the concept phase of development of an unmanned protective vehicle within the research project aFAS. Different stages of preliminary design and dependencies between them are displayed by the work products created and used. The full set of functional safety requirements and an excerpt of the safety argument structure of the SAE level 4 application are presented.