The design of inclusive paediatric mobility (IPM) interventions, such as children's wheelchairs, are entangled with technological, health and social considerations. As narratives around childhood, disability and mobility shift and transform, these entanglements evolve. In order to optimise the experience of childhood mobility, IPM designers must understand and respond to such changes and channel children's own requirements, desires and 'dreams' into the design process; this can be achieved by utilising a child-centred design approach. This paper identifies meaningful child-centred IPM design insights and opportunities through the interdisciplinary analysis of 130 dream wheelchair designs by disabled children, aged 4 to 17 years. A novel interdisciplinary and child-centred design analysis framework is developed to dissect, categorise and code the topics and features expressed through visuals and written descriptions in each of the children's dream wheelchair designs. Children's mobility narratives, desires and requirements are elicited and trending topics are discussed. It is proposed that valuing children's voices in the IPM design process could alter both the process of designing IPM interventions as well as the product outcomes.

Generative design (GD) algorithms is a fast growing field. From the point of view of Design Science, this fast growth leads to wonder what exactly is 'generated' by GD algorithms and how? In the last decades, advances in design theory enabled to establish conditions and operators that characterize design generativity. Thus, it is now possible to study GD algorithms with the lenses of Design Science in order to reach a deeper and unified understanding of their generative techniques, their differences and, if possible, find new paths for improving their generativity.

In this paper, first, we rely on C-K ttheory to build a canonical model of GD, based independent of the field of application of the algorithm. This model shows that GD is generative if and only if it builds, not one single artefact, but a “topology of artefacts” that allows for design constructability, covering strategies, and functional comparability of designs. Second, we use the canonical model to compare four well documented and most advanced types of GD algorithms. From these cases, it appears that generating a topology enables the analyses of interdependences and the design of resilience.

Prototyping is essential for fuzzy front-end product development. The prototyping process answers questions about critical assumptions and supports design decisions, but it is often unstructured and context-dependent. Previously, we showed how to guide novice designers in early development stages with prototyping milestones. Here, we studied the prototyping success perceived by novice design teams. This was done in two steps: (1) teams were asked to assign each prototype to a milestone, a specific purpose, a fidelity level, and a human-centered design lens, and then evaluate the success using a predefined set of criteria. (2) Teams were interviewed about the success of the prototyping process, this time using self-chosen criteria. Results related to (1) show that teams perceived prototyping activities with respect to desirability and problem validation significantly less successful than prototyping activities towards feasibility and solution validation. Results related to (2) show that teams mostly chose success criteria related to how well prototypes supported communication, decision making, learning, and tangibility. This insight may be used to give priorities to further improvement of methods and guidance in these areas.

Digital design tools have dominated engineering and design practice offering many advantages that ultimately improve efficiency in the design process. Digital sketching is one such example of these tools yet, its current use is primarily to present work to stakeholders (External Communication). It is relatively underused to externalise ideas (Externalisation) where sketching on paper is still favoured. This paper aims to understand the characteristics of digital sketching that motivate or discourage designers to use the tool. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 designers to gain insights on the tool's use in External Communication and Externalisation. Results highlight a trade-off between fidelity of visualisations and time and effort expended to achieve visualisations. The key difference between the use scenarios is the way in which this trade-off is connected to managing stakeholder involvement. While designers acknowledge advantages that digital sketching can offer in externalisation, it is viewed as requiring a level of detail to begin use. In conclusion we suggest segmenting roles of digital sketching in terms of the characteristics identified in this study would help to motivate use in Externalisation.

The objective of this paper is to explore challenges identified for implementation of scrum for hardware development intersect with agile principles found in the literature. A series of comparative analyses are done at the textual level, through logical intersections, and through thematic analysis. It is shown that there are five underlying themes found across two sets of scrum challenges (constraints of physicality and the 13 principles). These five themes include: flexiblity, chunkability, scalability, endurability, and teamability. These five themes further are found related to the defining principles of the agile manifesto. Using this understanding, future efforts will include empirical case study work to determine the impact that these have on application of scrum methods and tools. Additionally, guidelines should be developed to help hardware product engineers in applying scrum.

In this article, we introduce a protocol analysis-based approach to analyze the cognitive characteristics of conceptual ecodesigning of product-service systems (PSSs). We initially present a novel and generic model to represent the lifecycle stages of solutions offered by industry and we contextualize it to PSS based offerings. Based on this representation of the PSS lifecycle stages and that of its architecture, we propose a multi-level coding scheme and a protocol analysis-based approach to analyze the distribution of designers' cognitive effort on the following three dimensions: i) different lifecycle stages, ii) different aspects of PSS architecture and iii) ecodesign activities and environmental issues. We applied this approach to analyze a conceptual PSS ecodesign case, performed in a laboratory setting by a pair of experienced practitioners. The results clearly indicate the evidence of quantitative differences in the distribution of the designers' cognitive effort on the different dimensions of PSS ecodesigning and thus, confirms the applicability and utility of the proposed approach.