Today's rapidly evolving and changing market dictates constant changes in design requirements during the development process of a product. If development teams are unable or unwilling to adapt to these changes, this will ultimately lead to an uncompetitive product. How the change in requirements will affect the development process depends on the complexity of the product and the development phase in which the change in requirements occurs. The principles of Agility and the methods that follow these principles help in the successful introduction of changes in the product development process. The paper provides guidelines for the development of complex physical products taking into account the principles of Agility. The guidelines were set based on a critical review of the e-bike drive development process.

Pneumatically activated systems enable myriad types of highly functional inflatables employing a wide range of architectural approaches affecting their form and function, making systematic conceptual design difficult. A new architectural class of pneumatically activated systems, constrained layer inflatable systems, consists of hierarchically architected flat layers of thin airtight bladders that are internally and/or externally constrained to generate a variety of functionalities. The highly hierarchical architectural structure of constrained layer inflatable systems coincides with the hierarchy of produced functions, providing an opportunity for the development of a functional architectural decomposition, capturing the inherent relationship between architectural and functional hierarchies. The basis of the approach is conveyed through the design of an example constrained layer inflatable system. This approach empowers the systematic understanding of the interrelated architectural and functional breakdown of constrained layer inflatable systems, enabling designers to iteratively analyze, synthesize, and re-synthesize the components of the system improving existing designs and exploring new concepts.

The design of ITER, a large-scale nuclear fusion reactor, is intertwined with profound research and development efforts. Tough problems call for novel solutions, but the low maturity of those solutions can lead to unexpected problems. If designers keep solving such emergent problems in iterative design cycles, the complexity of the resulting design is bound to increase. Instead, we want to show designers the sources of emergent design problems, so they may be dealt with more effectively. We propose to model the interplay between multiple problems and solutions in a problem network. Each problem and solution is then connected to a dynamically changing engineering model, a graph of physical components. By analysing the problem network and the engineering model, we can (1) derive which problem has emerged from which solution and (2) compute the contribution of each design effort to the complexity of the evolving engineering model. The method is demonstrated for a sequence of problems and solutions that characterized the early design stage of an optical subsystem of ITER.

Transforming data into added-value information is a recurrent issue in the context of “big data” phenomenon, as new sources of data become increasingly available. This paper proposes to offer a fresh look on how data and added-value information are linked through the design of specific models. This investigation is based on design theory, used as an analysis framework, and on a historical example in the Earth science field. It aims at unveiling the reasoning logic behind the design process of models combining data science and domain knowledge in specific ways, especially involving not only knowledge about the physical phenomena but also on the measuring instrument itself. More specifically, this paper shows how specific efforts on exploring the originality of the new instrument compared to existing ones can result in designing performant models to transform new sources of data into information. This also suggests several important competencies to be involved in the model-design process: (1) a detailed understanding of the limitations of existing models (2) the ability to explore both the originality of the new source of data compared to existing ones (3) the ability of leveraging independent data sources.

One challenge with design automation is system transparency with adjustable granularity because of the many different forms of representation from multiple disciplines. Previous research has focused on visualization through the generation of graphs, packaging into electronic books, and model highlighting. The research presented in this paper focuses instead on a visual programming approach, commonly applied in the building industry, where design assets and external references are wrapped into visual components and managed on a canvas with information input/output relations displayed. This entails additional documentation efforts, but the visualization is arguably more useful as groups and levels of granularity are adjusted by the engineers themselves as a part of the development work. To explore visual programming and its potential benefits as a way of enabling transparency with adjustable granularity of DA systems within mechanical manufacturing industry, an existing textual design automation system was transformed into a visual one using Grasshopper® (a visual programming environment) and discussed with respect to DA system transparency, feature-based CAD, and DA system development.

Increasing product complexity and individual customer requirements make the design of optimal product families difficult. Numerical optimization supports optimal design but must deal with the following challenges: many design variables, non-linear or discrete dependencies, and many possibilities of assigning shared components to products. Existing approaches use simplifications to alleviate those challenges. However, for use in industrial practice, they often use irrelevant commonality metrics, do not rely on the actual design variables of the product, or are unable to treat discrete variables. We present a two-level approach: (1) a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the best commonality scheme (i.e., assignment scheme of shared components to products) and (2) a particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the design variables for one specific commonality scheme. It measures total cost, comprising manufacturing costs, economies of scales and complexity costs. The approach was applied to a product family consisting of five water hose boxes, each of them being subject to individual technical requirements. The results are discussed in the context of the product family design process.

The formalization of environmental issues has gained prominence since the definition of sustainable development by the Brundtland's report. Environmental performance has then been introduced to qualify the “green” contribution of an organization to its surrounding environment. However, its multi-dimensional aspects can be problematic when designing projects and making decisions, especially in the infrastructure sector where industrial activities are the most polluting ones. The aim of the study is to fill the environmental gap and confusion for decision-makers on the understanding of environmental performance, as well as to communicate on it, to define and share a clear vision and targets. A literature review is conducted and confronted with an industrial example in the railway sector to analyze the existing misunderstandings in industries while approaching environmental issues. By proposing and setting a clear framework of environmental performance, this research contributes to the conceptualization of environmental performance. More precisely, it characterizes an environmentally performant design project, in order to consider environmental performance as a driver and catalyzer of value creation.

Energy consumed in buildings is a main contributor to CO2 emissions, there is therefore a need to improve the energy performance of buildings, particularly commercial buildings whereby building service systems are often substantially over-designed due to the application of excess margins during the design process.

The cooling system of an NHS Hospital was studied and modelled in order to identify if the system was overdesigned, and to quantify the oversizing impact on the system operational and embodied carbon footprints. Looking at the operational energy use and environmental performance of the current system as well as an alternative optimised system through appropriate modelling and calculation, the case study results indicate significant environmental impacts are caused by the oversizing of cooling system.

The study also established that it is currently more difficult to obtain an estimate of the embodied carbon footprint of building service systems. It is therefore the responsibility of the machine builders to provide information and data relating to the embodied carbon of their products, which in the longer term, this is likely to become a standard industry requirement.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are able the collect huge amounts of data about themselves, their users, and their environment during their usage phase. By feeding these usage data back into product planning, manufacturers can optimize their engineering and decision-making processes. Despite promising potentials, most manufacturers still do not analyze usage data within product planning. Also, research on usage data-driven product planning is scarce. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the main concepts, advantages, success factors and challenges of usage data-driven product planning. To answer the corresponding research questions, a comprehensive systematic literature review is conducted. From its results, a detailed description of usage data-driven product planning consisting of six main concepts is derived. Furthermore, taxonomies for the advantages, success factors and challenges of usage data-driven product planning are presented. The six main concepts and the three taxonomies allow for a deeper understanding of the topic while highlighting necessary future actions and research needs.

The need to understand users and products is one of the cores for product success. There are many ways to reach this understanding,such as,interviews and consumer cocreation. This study put a focus on the application of product usage information (PUI). Although amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product's life, producers have not realized the full potential of these data in product development. The academic literature describes various use cases that outline how PUI supports this kind of understanding, and eventually benefits product development. Each of them provides fragmented information from certain perspectives. This diversity and the lack of systematic overview facilitates a fragmentation in the research of PUI usage in product development. To have an initial and unified overview of PUI's value on the understanding of users and products, this paper conducted a combination of systematic and descriptive review to form a sample with 12 papers. The result indicates that PUI increases producer's understanding about the product, its users and the context of usage. However, producers need to address several challenges if they want to apply PUI in product development successfully.

Circular Economy (CE) and the potential of reusing and recycling the products after the end of their life, becomes imperative for environmental, economic and social reasons. Especially during the 4th Industrial Revolution that is taking place nowadays, an increasing number of out-of-date equipment has to be replaced, which constitutes a chance and necessity to be reused, through recycling, redesigning and remanufacturing. The paper presents proof-of-concept studies regarding upcycling of obsolete and outdated equipment into novel test rigs mainly addressing research activities. Three such case studies are presented, namely the upcycling of an injection moulding machine into a modular test bench for power hydraulic components, the upcycling of scrap components into a hybrid hydraulic/ ICE powertrain rig and the functional augmentation of a gear roll tester to accommodate single and double flank tests. Significant savings in cost, raw materials and time are demonstrated in all cases and adherence to the CE objectives are observed.

Creativity is very important for designers, and methods to stimulate designers' creativity are the long-term focus of art design education. The senses are an important channel for designers to receive information and define core issues. Stimulating the designer's senses can help enhance their perception and creativity, and is of great benefit for the quality and efficiency of the design outcome. Today's interactive media technology provides more possibilities and advantages for designers' perception and sensation. The purpose of this research is to explore a way to stimulate the designer's senses through the use of interactive media, thereby improving the designer's design thinking and creativity, and providing designers with innovative design support. By means of interactive ground projection and experiments, and discussion of the advantages of interactive media to stimulate designers' senses, this research proposes innovations in art design educational media, which is valuable for the training and learning of designers and the development of virtual education environment in the future.

This paper analyses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a distributed product design project-based learning (PBL). The paper presents the ICT use of five international student teams during three product design phases: identification of opportunities, conceptual design, embodiment design. General results show that student teams used around 30 different ICTs for both taskwork and teamwork. Students reported that they used previously known ICTs or ICTs properly introduced to them during the initial course workshop. Results also show that team members often work individually on their tasks and use various procedures to share their results. Also, teams conduct some activities synchronously, suggesting the need for teams to have a collaborative workspace. Cloud-based collaborative ICTs (e.g. whiteboard, computer-aided design, document editor, task management) showed huge potential for individual and team tasks. Hence, educators and teams should carefully consider which ICTs to implement and learn, as it might greatly impact the execution of the product design PBL course.

More than ever, the ability to quickly and effectively shape ideas in a 3D environment is essential for industrial designers and with the rise of XR technology, a shift from traditional, screen-based CAD to VR-based CAD could improve time to market and personal effectiveness for product designers. In this study, this shift is assessed from a user experience perspective. Ten professional product developers are asked to design respirator masks. The experiment takes place in the Gravity Sketch VR app, using a HTC Vive Pro HMD. The participants are observed, surveyed and interviewed regarding different parameters on their experience. Participants experienced VR Aided Design as quick and intuitive. They personally felt performant and they enjoyed the process. As of now, VRAD is not seen as an alternative to neither sketching nor CAD. Instead, new users experience it being a new tool that can be positioned either parallel to or in between ideation sketching, clay modeling and detailed CAD design. Lastly, this paper includes a preliminary look at a VR Stylus for virtual reality aided design.

Vehicle concept development is a domain that has applied and detailed its process over decades. The megatrends of the 21st century of “automation” and “sharing” influence the vehicle concept in such a manner that this well-running process needs an update. The vehicle itself and the customer of the vehicle are changing and therefore the components of the vehicle and the input variables of the useroriented design of the vehicle concept must be changed as well. We present a development process for autonomous vehicle concepts to address these challenges. We are therefore analyzing the current definition of a vehicle concept and its development process. Based on a literature review of a selection of common design methodologies, we update this definition for autonomous vehicle concepts and present a development process that presents design concepts of autonomous vehicle in a user need oriented way. This includes the sharing of models since user needs could be fulfilled by more than one vehicle concept. We believe that the presented process can be a starting point for vehicle concept development of the 21st century.

Close to process measuring improves the data quality of a condition monitoring process. A possibility to access such measurements comes with the addition of a sensory function in machine elements. For a systematic development of sensing machine elements, an approach is presented for the identification of possible measurands to determine a variable of interest. Based on a modelling of physical causeeffect- relationships by using an effect matrix and an effect catalogue it allows to consider both direct and indirect measurements for the determination of measurands in technical systems.

The presented approach is initially applied to develop a sensory solution for self-lubricated fibrecomposite sliding bearings. The aim is to measure a variable of interest that can give a conclusion about the estimated remaining useful lifetime. The development process is described and possible solutions for measurement concepts are presented. The electrical capacity measurement, evaluated as the most promising concept, is described in detail and experimental results are presented.

These results show the applicability of the sensory concept and therefore, the benefits of the presented approach.

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is an efficient approach to support product development in order to meet today's challenges. The MBSE approach includes methods and, above all, modelling approaches of the technical system with the aim of continuous use in development. The objective of this paper is to use the potential of the MBSE models and to show the added value of such models on the system level when used as a single source. With this objective, this paper presents a three-step approach to systematically identify and apply meaningful modelling approaches within MBSE, based on the needs during the development process. Furthermore, an FMEA example is included in this paper to elaborate the use of MBSE in the system failure analysis.

Various factors influence mental well-being, and span individual, social and familial levels. These factors are connected in many ways, forming a complex web of factors and providing pathways for developing programs to improve well-being and for further research. These factors can be studied individually using traditional methods and mapped together to be analyzed holistically from a complex system perspective. This study provides a novel approach using PageRank and social network analysis to understand such maps. The motives are: (1) to realize the most influential factors in such complex networks, (2) to understand factors that influence variations from different network aspects. A previously developed map for children's mental well-being was adopted to evaluate the approach. To achieve our motives, we have developed an approach using PageRank and Social Network Analysis. The results indicate that regardless of the network scale, two key factors called "Quantity and Quality of Relationships" and "Advocacy" can influence children's mental well-being significantly. Moreover, the divergence analysis reveals that one factor, "Recognition/Value Placed on well-being at School" causes a wide range of diffusion throughout the system.

Value Analysis (VA) is a collaborative method that could be used to make a decision in the early phase of complex projects. In this framework, Stakeholders are involved into the process of decisionmaking and project success is facilitated. Systeme Architechting (SA) is a set of processes used for the conceptual phase of the design of complex systems while System Engineering (SE) is the set of processes used for the design phase of the system. In complex projects, Stakeholders are multiple and carry specific technical, social and environmental expectations that define their perceived Value of the project. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that VA and SA are two complementary approaches to collect and analyse Stakeholder needs in a complex project. The article presents an analysis of the literature review on VA and SA / SE. Based on this analysis, an illustration case is proposed to show how to integrate VA into SA to understand the needs of Stakeholders. The article concludes that the two methods VA and SA can be combined to analyze and would allow following several dimensions of Value (economic, social and environmental) within a complex project.

How to enhance creativity, especially by applying new technologies to creativity methods, is a question posed continuously by researchers. One reason for this is that creativity is an important part of people's daily lives and an essential component of society. Therefore, many methods to enhance creativity have been created, especially brainstorming, which is one of the most popular and effective tools that inspire individuals to generate ideas, hence enhancing creativity. Moreover, technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), provide an opportunity for individuals and groups to be creative. In response, recent studies have adopted VR in brainstorming to enhance creativity. However, there is a lack of systematic analysis of experimental approaches and creativity measures employed in this context. Addressing this question, this study categorized existing articles on the topic related to categories of avatars, environments, interfaces, or applications. The findings elaborate on trends, measures employed to evaluate creativity and idea generation, identified categories, and results of these studies.