It is an agreed fact among scholars that services are more sustainable compared to the products. By offering services, traditional companies can lock their customers into a long-term and sustainable revenue generation settlement. Available academic literature is abundant with methodologies related to service development. However, this study investigates various value adding service options related to financing and ownership of a product that can be offered on top of the existing products. It is important to understand these options from the consumer as well as supplier perspective. The most well established options available for financing/ownership are compiled, and sorted with respect to intangibility, ownership, financing and value addition scale. The study argues that the identified options incrementally add value to the existing offering by increasing the purchasing power and reducing the ownership obstacles for the customers. However, for the supplier, the decision depends on the trade-off between value addition for the customers and the business model changes required.

Chronobiology is the science that studies the role of time in biology. The study of time in human bodies revealed the presence of internal rhythms related to the time of day. Considering divergent thinking as one of the essential cognitive activities of conceptual design, this paper presents the results of investigating the effect of time of day on designers’ brain activity while performing divergent thinking tasks. An experiment was run with a revised Alternative Uses Task, measuring brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. Students with different educational backgrounds were recruited for this experiment, including engineering and industrial design students, to determine if the time of day affected them differently. The brain waves and related power results show significant differences with respect to the time of day and educational background. The differences are particularly evident considering the interaction of these factors. Further studies are required to understand the relationship between the differences detected and the designers’ behavioural performance and to identify which time of day is most effective for idea-generation activities for designers.

In connection with a design research project for professional in the Dutch building industry, an educational project was developed, the multidisciplinary master project Integral Design, to prepare our Master students better for their professional life. The concept of an earlier developed integral design workshop for professionals was implemented within the start-up workshop of our masters’ project integral design. The frame work of the approach is described as well as the positive effects on the collaboration between the design team members from different disciplines as result of the morphological approach of the Integral Design method. This method was also applied during workshops in different courses about design methodology As basically the same set-up for the workshop was used this allowed us to compare the results of the different students and analyse them. During the different workshop series the effects on the outcome of the conceptual phase of the design process has been investigated. The results of this analysis are presented in the paper and showed some remarkable similarities as well as some differences among the different student groups.

Drive units of eBikes are used in every type of bicycle and for different riding scenarios and riders. Due to the different riders and bike types, an enormous variety of influencing parameters and load spectra must be considered during the design process. Therefore, in this paper, a systematic approach for the optimization of the drive unit is presented, which adopts and combines several approaches from design theory. The focus is on efficient modeling and simulation of the relevant parameters and load spectra to minimize uncertainties in the design process.

Based on a system analysis, dimension-reduced parameter spaces are formed for the simulation of the system, meta-models are integrated into the simulation model and the results of the simulation are transferred into a data-based surrogate model to cover the parameter space in an efficient way with a minimum number of time consuming FE simulations. Furthermore, a coordinate-based evaluation method is presented for the FE model in order to form the input for the surrogate model, reduces the amount of data, and to allows a geometry- and mesh-independent evaluation to compare different models.