Makers have proven to be skilled at prototyping and therefore present a unique opportunity for companies, who seek to improve their capabilities, to learn from them. In this study, a mixed methods approach was used to understand possible benefits to both companies and makers from collaborating in prototyping, and to identify a set of design considerations to guide the future development of a tool to facilitate such collaboration. Despite challenges to collaboration, a tool designed to help companies engage with makers in prototyping could be beneficial to both and should be developed.

This paper presents an educational game fostering a new experience-based approach to teaching knowledge transfer using a codification strategy alone. The goal is to address and highlight some common issues and challenges that occur during knowledge transfer in product development and that are often difficult for especially students to grasp through exclusively a theoretical teaching approach. The game is introduced to 60 students in the final year of their Master's curriculum. In parallel, the game has been applied in a similar setting in a comparable higher educational institution, as well as in a product development organization.

“Sometimes you win—other times you lose and learn.”

More and more attention is paid nowadays to the human health concerns, associated with environmental problems arising from the fossil fuel use. The world scientific community offers new alternatives that, despite being more environmentally friendly, require an analysis of their potential environmental impacts. For example, biorefineries are becoming increasingly widespread nowadays offering a large gamma of bio-based products. However, it is necessary to take into account what potential effects such facility may have on the human health, depending on its geographical location since different territories may be more or less sensitive to its installation. Our study describes a new bioprocess implementation in terms of impact on human health through three countries: France, Belgium or China. In order to understand what territory can be more appropriate to the industrial process installation in terms of its effects on the human health, we propose to use the spatialized life-cycle analysis methodology.

This paper introduces a new method to help designers assess the impact of changes to a product platform when introducing a new variant. The method evaluates a platform design by investigating how changing some components will impact other platform design perspectives such as material, function, manufacturing processes and assembly time. To assess the usefulness of this method, it was applied to assess platform changes resulting from successive generations of scanner heads from two manufacturers. The method indicated that one manufacturer improved their scanner head design by improving the functionality of its components and assembly time. Whereas, the other manufacturer's new scanner head used more material and manufacturing processes without benefiting other design perspectives. Compared to existing product family evaluation methods which focus only on maximising commonality between product variants, the proposed method considers potential platform design improvements and assesses them from multiple design perspectives before deciding on reusing existing components or implementing the new design. The information from this method will also complement existing commonality indices.

The overall strategy of designing is addressed. The design decisions that have a major impact on the direction in which the process evolves are termed “strategic”, and here we study them from the perspective of abduction. The aim is to clarify the role of abduction (in the sense of inference to the best explanation) in strategic decision making in design. Four cases are used for demonstration and discussion: functional decomposition in novel situations; the ordering of subfunctions in a function structure; the order of development of design tasks; and managing the design iterations. We focus on two specific design strategies: systematic design and parameter analysis, and show that strategic abductions often take place within the chosen strategy for the sake of efficiency of the process. Such abductions are often triggered by rules (like focusing first on the issue with greatest uncertainty in the total design task) that derive from Peirce's principle for economy of research. It is found that strategic abductions may have a decisive impact on the outcome of a design process. Two potential ways of improving design strategies and related strategic abductions are discussed.

Boundaries between products and services vanish and companies increasingly offer hybrid solutions known as Product Service Systems (PSS). Thereby, a holistic view that includes both the product and service parts must be taken. This paper presents a discrete-event simulation of a PSS as a method for the specification of the product part. Besides product and service, the application scenario and the decision-making are also modeled. Based on the results for a case study, the customer requirements could be guaranteed as the essential product specifications were optimized to minimize total costs.

The value of models is well recognised in product and systems engineering. Modelling languages and diagrams are used to capture mental models and to handle model complexity. Literature research indicates that there are only very few approaches to utilise the potential of virtual and augmented reality for supporting tasks in model based (systems) engineering. The paper at hand contributes a new morphology of intuitive interaction for Immersive Abstraction as a holistic approach to extend that coverage. It presents a holistic framework to categorise solutions and future research directions.

A low cost robotic-assisted prototype for finger and hand rehabilitation of people affected by a stroke is presented. The system was developed by a team of undergraduate students led by a Design lecturer in collaboration with the Rehabilitation Unit of the Peñablanca Public Hospital in Chile.

The system consists of a flexion sensor equipped glove, a hand exoskeleton and an Arduino control unit. The patient wears the glove in his healthy hand. When s/he performs movements with the healthy hand, the sensors register the flexion of the fingers and send this information to the servo motors installed in an exoskeleton attached to the affected hand. In this way, the affected hand reproduces the movement of the healthy hand. The system uses a combination of the mirror therapy (the patient sees his/her affected hand moving in the same way that the healthy hand does) and passive exercising (as the exoskeleton produces the movement of the hand affected by the stroke). The combination of two types of therapy in a single low cost system makes the present work unique. In the near future, the developed prototype will be used to validate the effectiveness of the new proposed robotic therapy.

The challenge of user requirements for maintenance scheduling design in large asset-intensive industries suffers from lack of academic and empirical studies. Therefore, using a representative case study, this paper aims to: (1) identify the current practices and complex scheduling requirements; (2) propose a design support tool to optimize the maintenance scheduling process; and (3) report the gained benefits. The results reveal that the proposed tool can decrease the resource requirements, increase the capacity utilization, and reduce the cost while addressing the complex user requirements.

Design principles from the field of design engineering require that a product be designed as unambiguous, safe and simple as possible. Simplicity results on the one hand from an objective product-relevant side, on the other hand from the experience and knowledge of the user. A product that is perceived as simple by one person may seem complicated to another. From this, the questions arise, with which attributes simplicity can be described and how these are to be captured. In this paper, an evaluation system for the subjective attributes of simplicity is created using the fuzzy sets approach.

Designing products with a focus on self-explanatory assembly can reduce the use of procedural instructions and the associated problems. This paper describes how different groups of students, in two different design-engineering courses designed or redesigned products in an attempt to make the assembly of the product self-explanatory. The design outcomes are discussed in relation to the design context and linked to existing theory on design for meaning.

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.

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.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is one of the most prevalent cardiac diseases in the world. How might we design patient journeys improving quality of life using wearable cardiac devices for continuous out of hospital monitoring and support? Most of the studies to date have emphasised the technical aspects of implementing such devices with less focus on human factors. As such, remote cardiac monitoring appears to be burdened by poor patient adherence. This research study proposed a journey map based on Roger's technology adoption model to understand the challenges faced by AF patients and non/asymptomatic patients in using wearable devices to monitor their health. Data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Denmark with 12 participants aged 24 to 65 years was used. Interview results show that citizens prefer tracking heart activity only in conjunction with other measures such as steps or sleep and do not feel motivated to track their heart activity on a daily basis. Patients view wearables as a valuable tool to check if their health is all right, although apprehension that devices can cause unnecessary worry can lead to their rejection. Finally, recommendations for the design of patient journeys when using wearables were made.

This study is grounded upon the cognitive process and knowledge representation, analyzes the differences in perceptions between designers and users by applying schema theory. Per design process, we disassembled the semantic words that represent the design concept, and re-construct the representative visual imagery library. We experimented the imagery library with selective designers and users, and through their selections of the images, we uncovered: 1. The differences largely exist in concept interpretation and imagery selection between designers and users, which has strong relationship with their different schema; 2. The experiment revealed the fact that designers are inclined to understand the concept by disassembling the elements, and have obvious tendency of professionalism, while users’ interpretation prefers complete forms and life-oriented; 3. As compared with users, designers relatively prefer brand-new, creative elements in selecting visualized representation.

Designing an equally usable and emotionally appealing product remains a challenge for product developers, not least due to conflicting goals. Product developers need to constantly map the affective user requirements to the product, whereby the requirements for the emotional and usable product design often cannot be equally addressed. The systematic approach presented can help product developers in conflicting decision-making situations to represent these affective user requirements by selecting and prioritising context-relevant influencing factors using multi-criteria decision-making methods.

The Digital Thread is a system that connects different phases of the product lifecycle and the related data across one or more companies in the supply chain. This work aims to develop a graph data model of the Digital Thread, in the context of the vision of polyglot persistence, that interconnects the different phases of the lifecycle and their corresponding data models, processes, and IT systems. This work proposes a Digital Thread Graph that integrates a Digital Model and a derived Digital Twin, using object and relation attributes for view creation and filtering while minimizing redundancy.

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies enable the design of new products due to their potentials. The potential of function integration can be extended through a combination of AM with a component integrating technology forming a hybrid integrating additive manufacturing technology (hiAM). With a created development method optimization areas within a product are identified on a functional level using characteristics, structural configurations and integrated functional areas. These are derived analysing examples in literature. The method is applied to a mechanical arm and hand prosthesis.

Immersive reality (XR) technologies, particularly Mixed Reality (MR), offer promising opportunities for enhancing design prototyping. While recent studies often focus on Virtual Reality this work explores the application of MR, where focus lies on interlinking both the physical and digital to maximise benefit. Following a review of XR in design, a descriptive framework is presented to characterise MR prototyping. Two case studies are then presented to highlight the value of bridging the physical and digitalf worlds, before directions for further research in MR-based prototyping are outlined.

Half of the total greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of biodiversity loss come from resource extraction and processing. (EC 2020). To counter this, we must switch to sustainable, long-lasting products and slow down the use of resources. It is clear that these systems will not be fixed by incremental changes but by a series of disruptions. This article uses the Aristotelian causalities as a vehicle to break down the concept of “why” industrial design and discuss the underlying value propositions of distributed manufacturing. This critical perspective allows designers and engineers to bridge the knowledge-siloes and rewire the way a product is designed, sourced, built and consumed in relation to the four Aristotelian causalities. The paper discusses the limitations and potentialities for each causality in relation to a distributed manufacturing paradigm and argues for a new sustainable design concept: The Local Limited Edition. A site-specific product design, realised by brands to enrich brand value on local markets, improve market fit and increase attachment, ultimately improving the products' longevity and value of the products.