The extension of the product lifecycle is crucial in the application of Circular Economy principles. However, when Energy Related Products are concerned, managing a durable product does not necessarily mean dealing with sustainable products. This happens because components and/or materials are affected by aging and lead to increased requirement of resources to run (i.e. electricity); there are certain trends that, although distinct from the previous facts, balance the effects of aging, i.e. energy grid mix decarbonization. In the present work an approach that considers both the economic and environmental consequences of durable products is proposed. The Durabot tool has been developed to accomplish the environmental analysis. The work overcomes the main literature criticalities: enables the assessment of environmental consequences of durability ; the evolution of energy grid mix is introduced; the environmental consequences of durable products in different lifecycle scenarios can be assessed during the design phase; therefore, the components to substitute and to make accessible are identified. The tool is intended to be used aiming at design for product lifecycle extension, maintaining both economic and environmental convenience

Materials can be considered from a technical and experiential perspective. However, the latter perspective is more complex to study systematically. Four intertwined experiential levels describe the overall materials experience: sensorial, interpretive, affective, and performative level. Building upon the need in experiential material characterization for comparable physical material representations to enable within-material-class comparisons and the inclusion of extensive user aspects, this paper sums up the reasoning process regarding the understanding and design of an experimental set-up and its parameters of a specific case. The case objective is to formulate guidelines for the designer/researcher to set up experiential material characterization experiments with (i) plastic demonstrator forms and (ii) by consumers. Following elements are discussed: Assessors, Stimuli, Interaction Modalities, Dependent variables, Method, and Practical considerations. Next, future experiments can be carried out in order to generate holistic plastic material data on a larger scale, that can be collected in an experiential database and used by designers throughout the design process.

Due to the increasing importance of advanced systems, whose development calls for interdisciplinary and integrative approaches, and fundamental changes in the work environment, leaders are required to have a wide range of competences. Therefore, the aim of this work is to identify competences of future leaders, that are specifically relevant in Advanced Systems Engineering (ASE). Thus, professional, social, methodological, and self competences developed by a literature review are validated through expert interviews and prioritized by a survey. The insights are then presented in a competence portfolio including 30 areas of competences. The portfolio consists of areas of competence that are either relevant in the context of ASE (e.g. intercultural and interdisciplinary competence), New Work (e.g. competence to empower employees) or are relevant to leaders in general. It was possible to add further aspects that are necessary in ASE to the aspects from the literature review. The experts interviewed emphasized various aspects of interdisciplinary work and made clear that in future, leaders should place their employees at the heart of their activities and empower them according to their strengths and weaknesses.

The rapid development of 3D printing technology has an impact on all aspects of modern manufacturing, design and society. However, the home use of 3D printers is still limited by the difficulty in deploying the software and the technology which both need professional understanding and training. How to enable non-technical home users to use 3D printers without the need for training, becomes an urgent problem for both academics and the industry. This paper is concerned in an investigation into home use of 3D printers, their needs and preferences, their impacts on the interaction design of 3D printing. First, a questionnaire survey supported by 127 non-technical users is conducted to understand their preferences on several key steps of the 3D printing procedure. Then, we integrate the survey results into the interaction design process to improve the usability of the 3D printing software. Finally, the advantage of our implementation is tested via the user satisfaction and feedback towards the post-use period. Our design project shows a simple method to extend 3D printing interactive software to non-technical users, and pushes forward the landscape of the home use of 3D printers.

Both industry and science point out the need to integrate PLM and ALM since products evolve from mechatronic to smart products. This paper investigates data management tasks fulfilled when creating or improving design. Particularly, the differences and commonalities in design evolution management of the software and hardware disciplines are considered.

This paper introduces a beta version of a hash function based tool, applying the software management mechanism on mechanical revision management.

This paper presents models that identify two “cultures” of computational design practice. By reviewing the established culture of computational optimization efforts and contrasting it with the emerging work integrating human-factors into these optimizations, this paper argues that there are sets of key assumptions, outputs and tools that can be synthesized for a generalizable understanding of computational design. Furthermore, this synthesis facilitates the identification of key tools suited to computational design efforts seeking to integrate the complex data associated with human-factors.

The shift from linear to circular patterns is on the way and rise many questions. In the last ten years, reuse and upcycling are gaining more attention. Since reduce and reuse were describe as a priority by the European Union, some leading projects are unveiled in different countries. Scale and quality of those projects push the reuse issue out of the shadow, far from original prejudices who associate waste and reuse to « poverty » and « Do It Yourself ». Although Reuse emerge as a prominent question, the idea and boundaries of « what is reuse » appears to be blur and not clearly understood. This situation lead to general incomprehension, even for professionals. Reuse, repurpose, upcycling and recycling are usually considered to wear the same meaning despite a huge difference on what it implies.

In this paper we will examine these different notions through a pedagogical case study. We will draw the different ways to regenerate value at all steps of product life cycle in a precise manner. This allows to better insight the meaning of those issues in the case of student design education. In the same time, it aims to be a tool for teaching sustainable design and waste management.

Facing a rising competitive pressure, manufactures create advantages when they are able to offer customer-specific products to the conditions of a mass production article. Traditional configurators support the creation of personalized products from the elements of a modular product system, but are based on a pre-defined set of rules. The model based approach changes the environment of configuration from static configuration rules to the dependencies defined within the product's system model. So, by regarding target quantities of the user, the configurator identifies the optimal variant.

The perceived complexity of a product (product complexity) is doubtless an influential phenomenon in a design project. Insight into this factor and how it can be measured, is key to understanding its influence, supporting project planning and resource demand estimation. Opinions on product complexity vary greatly, with many definitions, scales and techniques to measure product complexity available; many of which draw their conclusions from engineering design research. Yet the field of product (or industrial) design companies, whose designers work across a vast range of product types, from domestic to industrial remains under researched. These designers have a tacit understanding of many influences over their projects, of which product complexity is one.

This paper presents an analysis of the dimensions (or measures) of product complexity found in literature and compares its findings to the measures defined by practicing product designers. This paper will demonstrate the process used to identify these dimensions and the scales developed to assess product complexity in a practical way and will make conclusions on the perspectives held on product complexity by product designers.

The utilization of data in design is a crucial aspect of shaping the product and service development. Despite the lack of extensive research on this subject, this study aims to bridge the gap by introducing the ‘D³IKIT’, a data-driven design process and toolkit. Through workshops, this process and toolkit offer a practical method for creating innovative product and service concepts using data and machine learning. Developed and tested with the participation of 42 individuals, the ‘D³IKIT’ provides valuable insights for both practitioners and academics.

Bio-inspired design is an innovative methodology for transferring biological solutions into technical solutions, for example for the design of weight- and load-optimized components. Bio-inspired design therefore offers great potential for meeting the challenges of designing additively manufactured components, such as avoiding warpage, supporting structures and material minimisation. Nevertheless, apart from bio-inspired topology optimization tools, bio-inspired design is rarely used in industrial practice because for many companies the practical applicability up to the prototype is not obvious. The aim of this work is therefore a practical approach to the search for biological systems, analysis, abstraction and transfer of analogies. We apply bio-inspired design on the design of a microtiter plate manufactured by stereolithography, whose dimensional accuracy is impaired by warpage. Here, the venus’ flower basket, a deep-sea sponge, can serve as a model. It has a hierarchical structure of silicate needles whose elements are abstracted for bio-inspired transfer. We show and evaluate the transfer of different analogies using a prototype.

The European Green Deal aims to reduce global emissions by minimizing the use of resources. Early validation of products helps to reduce rework, costs and therefore resources. However, validation of complex mechatronic products is challenging due to interdependencies. Companies are applying systems engineering to meet this challenge. Current validation approaches are insufficient in the early design phases. This paper presents an approach to validation using the system architecture in the B2B sector. A machine tool and a custom built machine are presented as evaluation examples.

The paper presents a Model-Driven approach for Product-Service System (PSS) Design promoting an increased digitalization of the PSS design process based on the combination of data-driven design (DDD) activities and value-driven design (VDD) methods. The approach is the results of an 8-year long research profile named (omitted for blind review) featuring the collaboration between (omitted for blind review) and nine industrial companies, in the field of PSS Design. It combines VDD models and the supporting data-driven activities in the frame of PSS design and aligns with the product value stream and the knowledge value stream in the product innovation process as described by Kennedy et al. (2008). The paper provides a high-level overview of the approach describing the different stages and activities, and provides references to external scientific contributions for more exhaustive descriptions of the research rationale and validity. The approach is meant to ultimately drive the development and implementation of a simulation environment for cross-functional and multi-disciplinary decision making in PSS, named Model-Driven Decision Arena, describe in the concluding part of the paper.

This paper demonstrates a concept for a cross-domain strategy for the sustainable processing and dissemination of product information. Important functional product features are explicitly mapped as working surface information in different domain tools with the help of the contact channel method and are integrated using a model-based systems development approach. The approach uses established state of the art design tools and can be integrated into existing product development processes, knowledge based engineering concepts and product (system) lifecycle management strategies.

Social robots are in direct communication and interaction with people, thus it is important to design these robots for different needs of individuals or small groups. This has revealed the need to develop design methods for personalized or mass-individualized social robots, which are expected to respond to many different needs of people today and in the future. In this paper, a previously developed 3D DSM model is implemented in the systematic conceptual design of social robot families. The model is independent of any physical elements and based on behavioural elements as perception, cognition and motoric action. The data regarding 45 different social robots from 80 articles in the literature is used to identify these three behaviours of the existing social robots and the mutual relationships among these different behaviours are defined in order to develop a 3D DSM structure to be used as a basis for designing social robot families. The resulting novel 3D DSM is a general-purpose, basic model that can be used to identify behavioural modules to design social robot families.

Product-Service Systems (PSS) are seen as key enablers of circularity. However, better sustainability performance of PSS when compared to transactional business models is not given and it must be carefully considered in the design process. The early-stage PSS design is considered crucial because it determines most of the future offerings' impact. Nevertheless, manufacturing companies struggle with PSS design and often rely on ad hoc intuitive approaches with low success rates. Current PSS design approaches have been dispersed in literature until a recent systematic literature review by the authors proposed a comprehensive generic process model to enable the inclusion of sustainability considerations in the early stages. This paper takes the generic process model as a starting point and instantiates it to the context of two manufacturing companies, seeking to (i) explore the instantiation process from a generic to company-specific process models to support manufacturing companies; and (ii) reflect upon and prepare an evaluation of the generic process model concerning eight predefined criteria. The study reveals a number of potential areas for improving both generic and instantiated process models.

Renewable energy is increasingly used and promoted. In the UK, for example, large scale renewable energy farms have been used to supply electricity with great effect. Given the large number of homes, there is considerable impact to be made by small scale residential renewable energy systems. Despite solar panels being the most common form of residential renewable energy technology, only 4% of buildings in the UK support solar technology of any kind. For direct electricity generation, silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) arrays are the most utilised, and when used in a residential setting, they are typically mounted on the sloped roofs. This is where the problem lies. The technology comes with a high cost, and there is further financial burden of installation and maintenance, making solar energy inaccessible for many UK homeowners. This paper presents a research and design innovation project to make PV technology more accessible in the UK. Edge Solar, the innovative, affordable, new PV system concept for UK homes may become a promising solution to significantly improve the accessibility to the PV technology and renewable energy at the household level in the UK and beyond with further development and commercialisation.

This study provides insights into the capabilities and performance of generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, in engineering design. ChatGPT participated in a 48-hour hackathon by instructing two participants who acted out its instructions, successfully designing and prototyping a NERF dart launcher that finished second among six teams. The paper highlights the potential and limitations of generative AI as a tool for ideation, decision-making, and optimization in engineering tasks, demonstrating the practical applicability of generating viable design solutions under real-world constraints.

The Covid-19 outbreak forced many universities across the world to transition from a traditional or blended format to fully online education. This paper presents a case study on the transition to an online education format for a circular design course. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through a survey with 26 students and interviews with six course teachers. The findings revealed that students preferred the on-campus versions over the online course components. They indicated the perceived lack of motivation, lack of sense of community, and a high workload as influencing factors. Teachers indicated the lack of connection with students as a drawback to online education but identified advantages to their teaching and the student’s learning experience. Suggestions for addressing an optimal blended course format are provided.

Heavy equipment manufacturers recognise an opportunity to realise customer value gains through offering new Product-Service Systems. Such transition implies a radical shift in how new systems are designed. Based on a set of interviews the paper investigates how radical PSS innovation can be enabled by the use of physical prototypes as boundary object to navigate early PSS design ambiguity. On such basis, suggestions for augmenting existing support tools are made in relation to the existing literature.