The present work introduces a cyclical model which showcases the process of immersion during Immersive Technological Experiences (ITEs) such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. This model is based on the identified concepts around immersion and immersive environments across 30 years. The concepts' similarities were used to organize them on a cyclical model by acknowledging the user's presence at the beginning and end of immersive experiences. The proposed model's value relies on its cyclical approach based on a user-centred perspective and having a general overview of the immersion process. The Immersive cycle can serve as a mapping tool for developers and researchers, thanks to the inclusion of guidelines that complements the model. Both of these were used in three different examples of ITEs. Furthermore, the cyclical model could be used as a tool for ideation and conceptualization during the early stages of developing immersive experiences. Nevertheless, it is recognized that this is the first step in developing this model; therefore, it still needs to be validated and improved based on tests with developers, designers and researchers in the field.

With the advance of the Internet and the Internet of Things, an abundance of 'big' data becomes available. Data science can be incorporated in design, which brings forward various opportunities for designers to benefit from this new material. However, the designer's perspective and their role remains unclear. How do they think about and approach data? What do they want to achieve with this data? What do they need to take ownership of designing with data? In this paper we take a design perspective to map the opportunities and challenges of leveraging large data-sets as part of the design process. We rely on a survey with 75 participants across a Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and in-depth reflective interviews with a subset of 9 participants. We discuss the impact of data on the roles designers can adopt as well as an approach to designing with data. This work aims to inform on educational support, data literacy and tools needed for designers to take advantage of this new era of design digitalisation.

The rise in the number of people living with long-term conditions is precipitating a shift towards the development of wearable technologies that can monitor our health remotely. This shift makes it possible to rethink the healthcare structure towards awareness and proactive prevention instead of treatment through empowering users, e.g. patients for self-management of their health. In a sector towards individual specialization and relying on personal healthcare management, design has a key role in user participation and engagement. This paper reports a co-design study that empowered the participants as designers to design human-centred interventions that foster sun protection behaviour in young men. The findings from this study show the following: 1) sun protection concepts to enhance young men's engagement in sun protection behaviour, 2) the integration of gender-aware design in digital health wearables contributes towards better user engagement in wearable technologies of the future.

This study centers on using different types of brief information to support creative outcomes in architectural and engineering design and its relation to design expertise. We explore the influence of design briefs characterized by abstract representations and/or instructions to frame design problems on the creativity of concept sketches produced by novice and advanced students. Abstract representations of problem requirements served as stimuli to encourage associative thinking and knowledge transfer. The Ishikawa/Fishbone Diagram was used to foster design restructuring and to modify viewpoints about the main design drives and goals. The design outcomes generated by novice and advanced engineering/architecture students were assessed for their creativity using a pairwise experimental design. Results indicated that advanced students generated more novel design solutions while also contributing the most useful solutions overall. Implications for creativity in design education and professional practice are presented. Educational programs aimed at promoting creativity in the design studio may find it helpful to consider that the way design briefs are constructed can either promote or inhibit different aspects of design creativity.

The literature on design distinguishes between exploration-based experimentation and validation-based experimentation. This typology relies on an assumption that exploration and validation cannot and should not be performed simultaneously in the same experimentation. By contrast, some practitioners, such as les Sismo, propose that proof of concept might combine these two logics. This raises the question of what design logic might enable this type of combination of exploration and validation. We first use design theory to build an experimentation design framework. This framework highlights a typology of proof logics in experimentation related to proof of the known and proof of the unknown. Second, we show that these proof models are supported by les Sismo's cases and describe a diversity of arrangements of exploration and validation mechanisms: sequential, parallel, and combinational. Through the formalisation of proof of concept as a double proof (proof of the known and proof of the unknown), we show that proof of concept can be more than a tool for the go/no-go decision by gradually validating propositions, questioning the relevance of propositions, and discovering new propositions to be investigated and tested.

Understanding the viewpoint of clinicians in a healthcare setting is a vital task to comprehend the success of patients undergoing physical rehabilitation. Addressing user experience is an essential activity which designers undertake when formulating product specifications at the early stages of product design. The involvement of clinicians during the product use-phase influences the progress and achievements attained by the patients throughout their rehabilitation journey. Several clinicians (n=16) were asked to participate in a qualitative study to evaluate the performance of different personae in activities of daily living. The experiences of patients who use rehabilitation products as part of their therapy session at the clinic were evaluated. Based on this evaluation, a set of clinician requirements were formulated to reflect the overall experience when using rehabilitation products. Understanding these requirements brought about several implications to be considered during the design cycle. Through these considerations and by adopting a user-centred design approach, designers are in a better position to design innovative products targeted at providing a high-quality user experience which increases customer satisfaction.

To counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

Mobile health, or mHealth, solutions offer great potential in the area of self-monitoring of chronic conditions, where most of the day-to-day management of the condition is done at home by the patient or their caregivers. Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep condition caused by an orexin deficiency in the brain resulting in its inability to regulate sleep cycles, causing poor quality sleep during the day and problems with wakefulness during the day. This paper set out to investigate whether Habitual, an app for tracking symptoms, daily habits and medication adherence for people with narcolepsy could increase their sense of empowerment. Ten participants were asked to test the app during a period of 30 days, after which they were asked to answer a survey to investigate whether their perception of their empowerment towards the management of narcolepsy had changed. Although using the app for only 30 days provides a very limited understanding of the impact of Habitual, this study shows positive indication for future mHealth solutions for the management of narcolepsy. Future studies should test the openness to using an app for the management of narcolepsy with a wider cohort.

Research in biologically-inspired design (BID) practice often focus on team composition or ideation based on an already discovered fascinating biological solution principle. However, how are the outcome of the early design phases affecting BID projects' quality?

In this study, historical data from 91 reports from student teams documenting their BID efforts from a 3-week course constitute the data source. Thus, the relationship between design problem types, function types, functions descriptions and BID projects' quality is addressed.

The study show that especially design problem types and function descriptions affect the BID projects' quality. For instance, BID projects dealing with open-ended problems yield better results than redesign problems with existing solutions operating in a very domain-limited solution space. Next, BID projects obtain the best results when using functions as drivers for analogy searching rather than properties. Finally, BID projects with certain function types seem to have more complicated conceptualization phases.

Product-Service Systems (PSS) have emerged as a key concept to meet the societal and market trends of increasing customer needs through the entire life-cycle. Unfortunately, several companies are struggling with getting revenues from service investments and translating 'real needs' to design improvements. The demand of the designer to go beyond the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is evident. This paper aims to map the interventions proposed by research in the area of PSS and VoC. Using a systematic mapping approach, the research domain was analyzed with regards to context and interventions. The results show a progressive development in the research area with a focus on the specification and realization of needs. A gap exists in connecting the engineers with 'real needs' and integrating the customer as a natural part of the entire development cycle of a PSS. By performing a systematic mapping, future research can be more focused and hopefully increasing its impact.

Understanding and applying consumers' needs in product development is key to success across various industries. The failure rate of new products, however, remains high because consumer demands are not adequately addressed. To investigate the role of consumers in the product development processes of small ventures, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews of 40 packaged food and beverage small ventures in California and Finland. Our findings showed that consumers rarely drove the design of new products, but rather functioned as a source of validation or feedback for small improvements of existing products. Consumer feedback was often unstructured and concentrated in the latter stages of the product development process. However, even though customer involvement in the small ventures' product development was more restricted than recommended in cocreation literature their influence still brought meaningful changes to the products. Given the small ventures' lack of resources, future research on creative, low-cost ways to co-create is called for.

Flexibility analysis helps improve the expected value of engineering systems under uncertainty (economic and/or social). Designing for flexibility, however, can be challenging as a large number of design variables, parameters, uncertainty drivers, decision making possibilities and metrics must be considered. Many available techniques either rely on assumptions that are not suitable for an engineering setting, or may be limited due to computational intractability. This paper makes the case for an increased integration of Machine Learning into flexibility and real options analysis in engineering systems design to complement existing design methods. Several synergies are found and discussed critically between the fields in order to explore better solutions that may exist by analyzing the data, which may not be intuitive to domain experts. Reinforcement Learning is particularly promising as a result of the theoretical common grounds with latest methodological developments e.g. decision-rule based real options analysis. Relevance to the field of computational creativity is examined, and potential avenues for further research are identified. The proposed concepts are illustrated through the design of an example infrastructure system.

This contribution explores non-user integration in a product development context of the development of a vacuum robot in order to analyse users as well as non-users of a product. While user profiles like the persona have been part of product development and product design for years, the non-user has not been widely explored.

Within this contribution the known concept of the persona is extended and further developed to the non-persona, a profile that describes non-users and why they do not use a certain product, in this case the vacuum robot. Including the non-user in product development offers the chance of addressing yet unidentified product requirements and therefore opening the product up to a bigger audience. This template works for both users and non-users and can be used to include both sides in a development project.

Within this paper, a new method for the quality refinement of external metric standard threads on 3Dprinted bolts is presented. The repair method is based on the application of thread rolling technology, which is applied in terms of cold forming after the regular printing has been finished. The explorative study proves, that the investigated technology has a good potential to solve known precision issues in FDM 3D printing regarding the required accuracy for function fulfilling standardized threads. The application of thread rolling can be done manually and with minimal tool effort, which makes the technology particularly attractive for low cost applications.

The availability of new research for IoT support and the human-centric perspective of industry 4.0 opens a gap to support operators in unleashing their creativity so they can provide improvements opportunities with IoT technology. This paper presents a case-study carried out in four Swedish manufacturing companies, where four different workshops were facilitated to support operators in the conceptualization of manufacturing improvements with IoT technologies. The empirical material gathered during these workshops has been analyzed in five different reflective sessions and discussed in light of previous research from industry 4.0, operators, and IoT support. Results indicate that operators can collaboratively create conceptual IoT solutions and that expressiveness in communicating their ideas and needs using IoT technology is more relevant than technical aspects and details of their proposed IoT solutions. This technological expressiveness is identified as a necessary skill to be cultivated on the shop floor and can potentially contribute to making a more effective and socially sustainable industrial landscape in the future.

Prototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

This paper is an invitation to a debate on the positioning of engineering design as a field of research. The paper lists a multiplicity of interpretations of design, questioning whether they are sufficient to describe engineering design in all its variety. Following a critical analysis of attempts to describe design's unique characteristics, and observations on the nature of design made from outside of the design research community, it presents a list of situations of design that the authors have observed in engineering practice, describing especially the relationship between design, technology and society. The paper then explores what these situations imply about the questions researchers should ask about the nature of design knowledge and expertise, and examines how the different situations might be categorised, before exploring the positioning of engineering design research with respect to other academic disciplines, in particular management and the human and earth sciences. The paper concludes with a call to a debate on the nature of engineering design with the aim to define this field more clearly to ourselves and to others.

The world is ageing, and this change will strongly impact the design of products, services and environments. Notwithstanding the proliferation of research initiatives, guidelines, policies and regulations, there is still a significant gap and lack of a uniformed strategy to guide engineers, designers, and architects to design inclusive environments. This article explores and summarizes through a review of international regulations and standards, the requirements that design practitioners need to consider when designing accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments. With this explorative study, we reviewed documentation and developed a comprehensive ontology comprised of people and design related criteria aiming to support the design of inclusive, smart and accessible buildings. The ontology was created by interpreting the criteria through semantics used in peoplecentered design approaches, where people's needs and design requirements are two fundamental phases for designing inclusively.

The results are intended to enable researchers and practitioners to better identify clusters of accessibility and inclusion criteria to facilitate the study and the design of accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments.

Applications of autonomous systems are becoming increasingly common across the field of engineered systems from cars, drones, manufacturing systems and medical devices, addressing prevailing societal changes, and, increasingly, consumer demand. Autonomous systems are expected to self-manage and self-certify against risks affecting the mission, safety and asset integrity. While significant progress has been achieved in relation to the modelling of safety and safety assurance of autonomous systems, no similar approach is available for resilience that integrates coherently across the cyber and physical parts. This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of resilience in the context of robotic autonomous systems, covering both resilience by design and resilience by reaction, and proposes a conceptual model of a system of learning for resilience assurance in a continuous product development framework. The resilience assurance model is proposed as a composable digital artefact, underpinned by a rigorous model-based resilience analysis at the system design stage, and dynamically monitored and continuously updated at run time in the system operation stage, with machine learning based knowledge extraction and validation.

Research funded projects are often concerned with the development of proof-of-concept products. Consequently, activities related to verification and validation testing (VVT) are often not considered in depth, even though various design iterations are carried out to refine an idea. Furthermore, the introduction of additive manufacturing (AM) has facilitated, in particular, the development of bespoke medical products. End bespoke products, which will be used by relevant stakeholders (e.g. patients and clinicians) are fabricated with the same manufacturing technologies used during prototyping. As a result, the detailed design stage of products fabricated by AM is much shorter. Therefore, to improve the market-readiness of bespoke medical devices, testing must be integrated within the development from an early stage, allowing better planning of resources. To address these issues, in this paper, a comprehensive VVT framework is proposed for research projects, which lack a VVT infrastructure. The framework builds up on previous studies and methods utilised in industry to enable project key experts to capture risks as early as the concept design stage.