Stakeholder perspective taking is a critical skill in early-stage problem exploration and framing. We examined stakeholder perspective taking within an early-stage design team of engineers at NASA to begin to understand in what ways and under what conditions designers adopt stakeholder perspectives in the context of professional engineering organizations. Our findings identify a spectrum of perspective taking during problem framing deliberations that ranges from (1) fully taking the stakeholder's point of view (POV), (2) interpreting the stakeholder's POV using the designer's POV, (3) implanting the stakeholder's POV into the designer's POV, to (4) fully taking the designer's own POV. We also identify and describe conditions that appeared to encourage or hinder perspective taking in this setting. These findings are significant because they suggest ways to gauge and encourage the skill of stakeholder perspective taking among professional engineers working on real-world design challenges with societal implications.

Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems were created to address the driver's failures. All these ADAS are a part of the evolution of the vehicles towards whole automation. To complete its launch in the automotive market, autonomous vehicles have to pass safety tests to acquire the consumers’ trust. To receive the approval of the public, the self-driving car has to take into account the human feeling. The risk perceived by the driver is one of the new emotional form to integrate at the validation plan. The purpose of this study is to examine the perception of the risk of a self-driving car's driver.

Closing the material loop is fundamental to circular economy (CE). However, significant quantities of resources are currently landfilled. Today, companies realise the importance of take-back for CE but face several barriers in implementing it, lack of knowledge, being one such barrier. To address this, a proposal is presented for the design of a configurator to support companies evaluate different approaches, as well as opportunities and challenges for designing and implementing take-back. The paper presents a conceptual framework for the configurator, based on a systematic literature review.

Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) differs from other forms of AR by allowing the projection of digital images onto a model. This allows the AR to be more tangible and for interaction to be more realistic. The scale of the model plays a role in the realism but may be constrained by technical factors. This study attempts to understand the influence scale has on a design session by analysing the concept generation process, the ease of designing and the design behaviour. Understanding how these factors are influenced by the model scale betters the understanding of how SAR can influence design.

In the design studio, academic (professor) and practitioner tutors provide individual mentoring to students as they progress in their design projects. Prior studies suggest that design practitioners may follow a different design process compared to academics, but little is known about how this difference relates to their design tutoring. This study explores the similarities and differences in tutoring by academics and practitioners. We use a question-asking lens to characterize the tutoring styles of four tutors - two academics and two practitioners - over a five-week design project in an engineering design studio. We find that academic tutors ask questions at a significantly higher rate than practitioner tutors, suggesting a more question-centred tutoring style. We also find that proportionally more of practitioner tutors’ questions are generative in nature, while the academic tutors employ more convergent thinking in their questioning. This may be an indicator of the practitioners' own design thinking, which might be more solution-focused than that of academics. These preliminary findings motivate future investigations of the relationship between differences in tutoring and impact on student design learning.

This paper explores the role of integrating behavioral science to refine human-AI interaction, essential for ensuring safety and efficiency. Advocating for empathetic, user-centric design, the paper illustrates how behavioral insights can effectively inform AI-integrated designs, making AI applications more intuitive and ethically aligned with diverse human needs. This approach can ultimately enrich interaction across systems, fostering a more harmonious human-AI synergy.

One of the most challenging activity in the engineering design process is the definition of a framework (model and parameters) for the characterization of specific processes such as installation and assembly. Aircraft system architectures are complex structures used to understand relation among elements (modules) inside an aircraft and its evaluation is one of the first activity since the conceptual design. The assessment of aircraft architectures, from the assembly perspective, requires parameter identification as well as the definition of the overall analysis framework (i.e., mathematical models, equations).

The paper aims at the analysis of a mathematical framework (structure, equations and parameters) developed to assess the fit for assembly performances of aircraft system architectures by the mean of sensitivity analysis (One-Factor-At-Time method). The sensitivity analysis was performed on a complex engineering framework, i.e. the Conceptual Design for Assembly (CDfA) methodology, which is characterized by level, domains and attributes (parameters). A commercial aircraft cabin system was used as a case study to understand the use of different mathematical operators as well as the way to cluster attributes.

As design thinking became popularized, practitioners in the field pointed out that design thinking rarely takes stakeholders and contexts into account as a result of focusing solely on end-users. We believe such a limitation can be complemented with speculative design, which critiques the future that an idea depicts and interrogates relationships with social, cultural, economical, and political systems. This paper, through pilot interviews with 10 participants and a thematic analysis on interviews with 12 participants, explores possible interaction between design thinking and speculative and critical depiction of the future. Speculative and critical inquiries allowed the participants to consider various social contexts and stakeholders, and further helped them shape and brainstorm the ideas’ potential values and challenges faced during adoption. The overall critical speculation influenced various steps of the design thinking process. The paper contributes to the literature by reporting a novel application of speculative design to the conventional design thinking process. In the future, we hope to further explore other elements of speculative design and their impact on design outcomes.

In recent years major companies such as Philips, H&M and Google have adopted a circular economy agenda to promote sustainability. Design consultancies such as IDEO has developed and promoted a circular design guide to help companies in this endeavour. However, designing for a circular economy often require design and reconfiguration of entire value chains – making the transition towards a circular economy rather difficult. In this paper we analyse a development project from the Danish island of Bornholm to investigate how to align diverse actors across the value chain in a process of co-creating systems for a circular economy. We combine design, value chain considerations and circular economy mindsets to informing negotiations of concerns among actors in the value chain.

Such strategical navigation might involve:

1. Staging initial spaces for dialogue with central actors from the value chain and initiates a process of mapping out their concerns

2. Staging a re-alignment space where the diverse actors can meet and interact to discuss and negotiate their concerns and their roles in the network

3. Design and enactment of a number of objects to faciliate negotiations

This research aims to study the passenger's sustainable attitudes, in-flight catering behaviour, and to develop a persuasive model for behaviour change. Current studies towards the in-flight catering waste are primarily focused on dealing the recyclable materials such as cupboard, newspaper and food packaging. In a survey of 624 respondents, the environmental attitude was a poor predictor of environmental behaviour. The survey data were used to develop the persuasive model based on Persuasive Technology. Four phases of the in-flight catering are based on data from the passenger survey. In-flight touchpoints performed with persuasive function is proposed to raise awareness of food waste classification onboard. This study illustrates how persuasive strategies can change the passenger's food-wasting behaviour.

In order to efficiently design and deliver customized products, it is crucial that the process of translating customer needs to engineering characteristics and into unique products is smooth and without any misinterpretations. The paper proposes a method that combines design optimization with value-driven design to support and automate configuration of customized products. The proposed framework is applied to a case example with spiral staircases, a product that is uniquely configured for each customer from a set of both standard and customized components; a process that is complex, iterative and error-prone. In the case example, the optimization and value-driven design models are used to automate and speed-up the process of delivering quotations and design proposals that could be judged based on both engineering characteristics as well as their added value, thereby increasing the knowledge at the sales stage. Finally, a multi-objective optimization algorithm is employed to generate a set of Pareto-optimal solutions that contain four clusters of solutions that dominate the baseline design. Hence the decision-maker is given a set of optimal solutions to choose from when balancing different economical and technical characteristics.

Increasingly competitive and multifaceted business landscapes and the accelerating pace of innovation require organizations to build in-house capability to evaluate the effectiveness of their design and redesign their organizational structure to drive agile product development. The purpose of this research is to examine how the ability of an organization to implement agile is affected by the organization design. A case study based on 35 semi-structured interviews and field observations at a leading, large-size, Danish software development company was carried out. Adopting the contingency perspective, this paper presents the relevant organizational elements that can increase organizational agility and how the companies can leverage the advantages of the design. Accordingly, it provides a framework that compromises eighteen core organizational practices grouped into four categories (organizational structure and governance, culture and people, IT tools and data infrastructure, and processes) to understand the effect of organization design on agile product development.

Considering the prevalence of digital interaction within the Generation Alpha, this study focuses on the digital wellbeing of elementary school-aged children in South Korea. By taking into account the multi-faceted nature, this study frames the issue that exists within children's digital wellbeing as a complex problem and aims to have a better comprehensive understanding of the system using a designerly and systems thinking approach. Thus, this study conducts a Systematic literature review and thematic analysis to get grasp of the current situation which then is translated using a systems thinking-based visualization tool to convey the causal relationships that exist within the system. Therefore, the outcome of this study presents a concept map that consolidates the findings to communicate a holistic perspective of children's digital wellbeing which can be used in design activities and decision-making processes which contribute to future design solutions and conversations.

This work studies the perception of the impacts of AI and human process managers during a complex design task. Although performance and perceptions by teams that are AI- versus human-managed are similar, we show that how team members discern the identity of their process manager (human/AI), impacts their perceptions. They discern the interventions as significantly more helpful and manager sensitive to the needs of the team, if they believe to be managed by a human. Further results provide deeper insights into automating real-time process management and the efficacy of AI to fill that role.

Though many engineering schools are integrating sustainability in the curriculum, most are still struggling, especially with social sustainability. The aim with this study was to test a process created to help students work systematically with these issues. Results show that students in the study did indeed benefit from structured process support as their general knowledge level of social sustainability issues as well as their understanding of how to integrate them in a product assessment was very low. Reflections from teaching staff on how to further develop such a process are also shared.

Patent analysis is a popular topic of research. However, designers do not engage with patents in the early design stage, as patents are time-consuming to read and understand due to their intricate structure and the legal terminologies used. Manually produced graphical representations of patent working principles for improving designers’ awareness of prior art have been demonstrated in previous research. In this paper, an automated approach is presented, utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify the invention working principle from the patent independent claims and produce a visualisation. The outcomes of this automated approach are compared with previous manually produced examples. The results indicate over 40% match between the automatic and manual approach, which is a good basis for further development. The comparison suggests that the automated approach works well for features and relationships that are expressed explicitly and consistently but begin to lose accuracy when applied to complex sentences. The comparison also suggests that the accuracy of the proposed automated approach can be improved by using a trained part-of-speech (POS) tagger, improved parsing grammar and an ontology.

This paper presents a novel approach to include a holistic description of abstract physics in a digital engineering framework. Physical phenomena realize the numerous functions of technical systems and are an important link between rather abstract product functions and the concrete product geometry and material. Until now, a possibility to integrate the analysis and synthesis on this level of abstraction into a holistic engineering frameworks is not existing. The novel approach employs graph-based design languages using UML for this endeavour; the product example is a two-wheel scooter.

One of the foundations of product design is the division between production and design. This division manifests as designers aspiring to create fixed iconic archetypes and production replicates endlessly in thousands or millions. Today innovation and technological change are challenging this idea of product design and manufacturing. The evolution of Rapid Prototyping into Additive Manufacturing (AM), is challenging the notion of mass manufacture and consumer value. As AM advances in capability and capacity, the ability to economically manufacture products in low numbers with high degrees of personalisation poses questions of the accepted product development process. Removing the need for dedicated expensive tooling also eliminates the cyclical timescales and commitment to fixed designs that investment in tooling demands. The ability to alter designs arbitrarily, frequently and responsively means that the traditional design process need not be applied and because of this, design processes and practice might be radically different in the future. In this paper, we explore this possible evolution by drawing parallels with principles and development models found in software development.

When designing assistive devices for children with disabilities, designers mostly consider technical and functional aspects and overlook factors that affect their usage from children’s perspective. Therefore, in most cases, assistive devices do not fully meet the needs of the children and may create a negative effect on children’s well-being. To explore the opinion’s of children using 3D printed hand prosthetics in Country-Xx, individual generative sessions were conducted with four children with limb deficiency. Generative tools are used to engage children and encourage them to express themselves in relation to prosthesis use. The main aim was to investigate how children provide design relevant information that may help designers to achieve improved assistive devices that support children’s physical, emotional and social wellbeing. Children’s feedback related to prosthetic usage categorized under two topics; expectations of children for prosthesis use and children’s priority expectation for the prosthesis. The findings are argued to be useful and usable by NGOs, product designers and design researchers who work with children with disabilities.

Design effort, the amount of time required to complete a project or task (Salam et al., 2009; Salam and Bhuiyan, 2016), is a required resource for any design project which can be influenced by a number of factors. Estimating design effort is a significant challenge that can be mitigated through an understanding of these influential factors. This understanding is held as tacit knowledge by experts, earned through experience; yet, although these factors vary in type and impact, understanding their details can provide insight and improve future estimations. Some previous methods to estimate design effort identify these factors, either from: expert opinion, or historical data analysis with each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

This paper is comprised of three parts:

A review of published methods and tools for estimating product design effort and whether they consider and identify influential factors; an analysis of possible trends in the identification of factors influencing product design project length; and a new method for identifying the influential factors of product design project length.