The dynamics of design teams play a critical role in product development, mainly in the early phases of the process. This paper presents a conceptual framework of a computational model about how cognitive and social features of a design team affect the quality of the produced design outcomes. The framework is based on various cognitive and social theories grounded in literature. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is used as a tool to evaluate the impact of design process organization and team dynamics on the design outcome. The model describes key research parameters, including dependent, independent, and intermediates. The independent parameters include: duration of a session, number of times a session is repeated, design task and team characteristics such as size, structure, old and new members. Intermediates include: features of team members (experience, learning abilities, and importance in the team) and social influence. The dependent parameter is the task outcome, represented by creativity and accuracy. The paper aims at laying the computational foundations for validating the proposed model in the future.

This paper presents the results of computational experiments aimed at studying the effect of experience on design teams’ exploration of problem-solution space. An agent-based model of a design team was developed and its capability to match theoretically-based predictions is tested. Hypotheses that (1) experienced teams need less time to find a solution and that (2) in comparison to the inexperienced teams, experienced teams spend more time exploring the solution-space than the problem-space, were tested. The results provided support for both of the hypotheses, demonstrating the impact of learning and experience on the exploration patterns in problem and solution space, and verifying the system's capability to produce the reliable results.

The democratisation of technologies, knowledge and activities have been changing the world of designers, blurring the boundaries between amateur and professional designers, especially within the connected phenomena of the Maker Movement and Indie Designers. Within this context, how can be collaborative design processes documented, analysed, managed, shared? This article investigates the role of meta-design digital tools for the facilitation of distributed systems of creative agents, formally trained and informal amateurs that collaboratively design and produce artefacts. It documents a research study organised for testing a digital meta-design platform with users and the researcher as meta-designer: the results provide insights for improving the platform but also for building a comprehensive research through design framework that connects meta-design research and practice for exploring the role and nature of meta-design and meta-designers in facilitating collaborative design processes starting from their description with digital ontologies.

A comprehensive domain independent system-level perspective of conceptualization of design is a major driver for successful product development. Such a general design model, Integral Design, was developed based on a specific Dutch design method, Methodical design, which was aimed specifically for applications in the Mechanical Engineering domain. The design method was specifically developed with the help of experiences designers and is meant for young students in a multi-disciplinary design context, such as building design. Integral design provides a suitable framework, existing of phases and specific steps, for guiding users through the design process. It support not only the designers but also helps them to make the process explicit and to communicate the actions and results to their stakeholders. The focus in this paper is on presenting the overall frame work of the design method. In the Netherlands in several bachelor and master educational programs at Technical High schools and the University of Technology Eindhoven use this model to teach students mechanical engineering design and building services design. As such it is one of the most popular design method in the Netherlands.

Creative workspaces are becoming popular in many organizations. They are believed to support innovation efforts and creativity among employees. This paper presents spatial evidences of creative work environments from real-life organizations, based on an exploratory multi-case study in 18 institutions. The found workspaces were mapped and categorized according to the qualities they might provide for affecting creativity. The resulting inventory of creative spaces contributes to the emerging interest on creative workspace design by presenting inspiring best-practice examples. The shown examples provide the readers with a better understanding how a creative space could be designed in order to provide an environment for an innovative organisation. Related literature was added to explain the possible impact of specific spatial configurations.

The purpose of this work is to compare impact of regulatory focuses, namely preventive and promotional contexts, on creative ideation measured by novelty and usefulness. The study consisted of Singaporean students from an undergraduate university, and assessed their personality using the Big Five, Regulatory Focus, Creativity type and creativity outcomes measured with the Consensual Assessment Technique by completing a Collaborative Sketch exercise. Participants were randomly assigned to either the preventive, promotional or a baseline condition and tasked with a design problem necessitating a solution in the form of sketches. This study found the three conditions to yield significantly different novelty scores, but not usefulness scores. The most impactful condition on novelty was the baseline, indicating novice designers are capable of creating novel products and services. Those in the promotion condition created the second most novel sketches, or design solutions, followed lastly by the prevention condition. This may be so as novice designers consider larger space of solutions and may generate more ideas. This research is useful in creative pedagogy and for design professionals.

With the trend of global collaboration and development of Internet of Things in industry 4.0, the collaboration relationships between designers is getting more close and important than before. Therefore, when project manager assign designers to design projects, it is very important for them to select design projects with the consider about the expectations of the designers regarding the different projects and collaboration ability for the designers in the projects while it is very important to identify the projects with the consideration of skills, experiences, availabilities and so on. Even though, there are various methods for selecting projects, most of these methods not consider about the expectations of designer and the collaboration ability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a project selection methodology, which consider about the designers’ expectations to the candidate multi-project and collaboration ability in the candidate multi-project. The main objective of our research is to help project manager to find an adaptable and comfortable multi- project to the designer.

The open source design (OSD) is an autonomous community dedicated to design new hardware products, peer-to-peer, with collaborative design and intellectual property copyleft, using web platforms to share projects. The research about these platforms indicates absence of important configuration management features as versioning, headlines and coding. One possible explanation for such finding is that these products are developed by non-designers. This argument was investigated comparing projects from two OSD communities, on the same theme, but with different origins. The hypothesis is that academically-influenced communities present better design management practices for repositories than others created by non-specialists. The hypothesis was not verified and the results show that there is no difference in the proportion of BO types or level of detail. However, it was identified five distinct characteristics: those of academic origin the communication is better detailed, the purpose is associated with methodological support, the structure of information promotes redundancy, the target-audience is the technicians and the success of project is associated with the number of interactions.

Coordination in system design requires an interplay between different roles. In this work, we identify five design team roles that pertain to the partitioning and coordination of distributed design team tasks. The proposed characterization is based on self-reported responsibilities and communication behaviors from 109 student designers in 22 teams at the conclusion of a semester-long design project. The self-reports capture both how team members viewed their own work as well as communication patterns between team members. We leverage two representations of this data. Through text analysis, we identify keywords describing team member roles and responsibilities. Social network analysis can further distinguish roles based on team communication behaviors. Cluster analysis on both types of data identifies groups of individuals with similar characteristics. The resulting five clusters capture common roles in system design teams that simultaneously capture the diverse responsibilities and communication patterns.

The purpose of this work is to compare the creative outcome in the educational context of students belonging to two different cultures, namely Singaporean and Portuguese and determine whether they respond differently to the same design brief. The participants from both samples equal 121 student designers and span from 18–25 years old. Students were randomly distributed within a uniform, standard of student performance, which allowed for fair comparison between groups. Expert judges were employed to judge the creativity of concept sketches generated during a Collaborative Sketching exercise. To evaluate the creative outcome, we employed the Consensual Assessment Technique based on a rubric-based system developed in our earlier works. The analysis of variance procedure revealed no statistically significant difference between the averaged total scores of the two groups on the appropriateness measure. However, the student designers from both samples showed statistically significant differences when provided with a baseline brief in the novelty measure. In consideration of the overall creativity scores, a relatively equivalent performance is observed across the two universities.

Globalisation and the mixing of people, cultures, religions and languages fuels pressing healthcare, educational, political and other complex sociocultural issues. Many of these issues are driven by society's struggle to find ways to facilitate deeper and more emotionally meaningful ways to help people connect and overcome the empathy gap which keeps various groups of people apart. This paper presents a process to design for empathy – as an outcome of design. This extends prior work which typically looks at empathy for design – as a part of the design process, as is common in inclusive design and human centered design process. We reflect on empathy in design and challenge the often internalised role of the designer to be more externalised, to shift from an empathiser to become an empathy generator. We develop and demonstrate the process to design for empathy through a co-creation case study aiming to bring empathy into politics. The ongoing project is set in the Parliament of Finland, and involves co- creation with six Members of the Parliament from five political parties. Outcomes of the process and case study are discussed, including design considerations for future research.

This paper examines some aspects of physical-digital workspaces, focusing on multi-user, multi-touch technologies and how different workspaces impact collaboration. We introduce the concept of globally collaborative work. We chose to use case studies completed by groups of students in an engineering course to test different workspace modalities: the use of a large multi-touch table top in conjunction with a multi-touch board (vertical), the use of tablets with the multi-touch board, and finally the multi-touch board alone. The evaluation criteria are based on modes of interaction which emerge during globally collaborative work sessions: individual work, communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. We hypothesized that the workspaces would influence collaborative activity, expecting to see higher rates of collaboration in the table top environment than in the other two modalities studied. However, results showed less co-building and more cooperative work, as students divided their work and later attempted to negotiate a coherent product built on individual contributions. Lastly, we share a few design recommendations based on these results.

The democratisation of design permits greater stakeholder involvement in what has traditionally been a domain reserved for experts; the design process itself. This is enabled by technological advances in fields such as 3D printing, virtual reality and high-speed peer to peer communication technologies which have fuelled the development of new and innovative design methods. This paper compares and contrasts different approaches to the democratisation of design, and in particular, those that aim to involve wider stakeholders in the design process itself. Three different approaches(design by play, design by generation and crowdsourcing for design) are defined and contextualised within existing design frameworks and their respective suitabilities to democratise different design phases are considered. An exemplar use case of each approach is presented in order to assess how stakeholder engagement is affected by each democratising strategy. The discussion compares and contrasts the approaches with respect to their applicability and utility for different stages of the design process and how the power dynamics of the design process are altered when the different approaches are employed.

The observation of designers' behaviour in collaborative design activities and the analysis of protocols improved the understanding of how novel ideas emerge, what occurs among designers and, indirectly, what methods have a good impact on the outcomes. Yet, protocol analysis requires recording the design sessions, often in a simulated environment, thus introducing a bias in the observation. Moreover, the analysis takes up to 1000 times the duration of the observed design session. These limitations definitely hinder the scalability of this practice to large experiments in real operational environments.

This paper investigates the possibility to use the data collected in log files, automatically recorded during collaborative design sessions assisted by an ICT design support tool, as a means to extract relevant information about the design process and ultimately to infer insights about co-designers' cognition during the session. In this perspective, the paper proposes a set of metrics tailored to an Augmented Reality-based collaborative design tool. The study has been carried about by processing the data collected in 5 real case studies conducted in three different design companies.

Adopting design thinking and innovation-oriented approaches in organizations is crucial but not always simple. New practices of collaboration, user-orientedness and exploration require a compatible culture to be successfully integrated into product development. This paper presents a case study based on 12 interviews of employees and managers in a large Finland-based technology company, introducing new ways of working to product development. Silos, focusing on inventions, and a lack of resources for exploration were highlighted as key challenges in transitioning from incremental development to innovations. Perhaps counterintuitively, introducing new ways of working requiring a collaborative culture - the most widely recognized shortcoming in the current practice in the case - were best received, and support and feedback could be found for pilot projects in these arenas. When the gap between the practice and culture was smaller, change efforts could perhaps be more challenging, as there was less of a consensus on a need to change. The results suggest than developers need not automatically shy away from piloting new ways of working even when existing cultures are not compatible.

In testing and simulation departments in product development (PD) data types, data structures and data storage are often very different. Exchange of data and information is normally not automated and often not supported by management systems. This can lead to loss of time and information. A literature study in combination with 20 expert interviews and the analysis of documents as well as data storage structures and IT systems in a PD department of a motorcycle manufacturer were performed. Test and simulation processes were classified and standardized, documentation formats analyzed, standards in Test Data Management (TDM) and Simulation Data Management (SDM) as well as verification and validation processes compared. IT support in SDM is better than in TDM. An integration of TDM and SDM could lead to improved collaboration between testing and simulation departments. Options for this integration could be specific ontologies, object-oriented interfaces, a higher-level intermediate application, use of a common standard or integration of one standard into another one.

Scientific discoveries and inventions have long been established as two distinct and sequential activities. It has nonetheless been showed that projects aiming at producing both scientific discoveries and inventions could record impressive results. Our investigations are focusing on the creativity of collaborations outputs: a first agent is entailed to design a scientific discovery and another one invention. We use fixation effects as a performance measurement indicator for creativity based on Design Theory. We propose a first set of elements that can be suffering from fixation effects in both invention and scientific models designers reasoning. We propose a series of defixed inputs that could be shared between both designers to overcome their fixation effects. We highlight that if partners are engaged in one-way knowledge transfer it can conduct to “fixation traps”. We define a set of restrictive conditions that could conduct to a “cross-defixation process”: both actors would be able to create conjoint new inventions and scientific models in the non-fixed design path. In particular this process does not required designers to be defixed before starting the collaboration.

Adaptive buildings constitute an interdisciplinary approach for realizing the next generation of buildings in order to reduce the immense material requirements and energy demand throughout all lifecycle phases. Based on a novel cooperation between the disciplines of Architecture and Civil and Mechanical Engineering, adaptive support structures and skins are developed within the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1244. A holistic planning process is required in order to reduce the high complexity and achieve a goal-oriented procedure during the planning of such buildings and the development of integrated systems.

Part of this research is the development of new specific and the transfer of established methods from different disciplines. The experience gained during the planning of an adaptive, high-rise demonstrator building within the research project has shown that the methods for application must be provided in the form of a method toolbox to present their purpose, application time and results within the planning team. Based on the examination of existing method toolkits, this paper focuses on the development of an approach while considering context-specific requirements.

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.

This research was motivated by the need to design for self-organized and sustained collaborative communities. A collaborative community is defined as a group of people who are bound by a sense of community and fulfil their unmet needs through collaboration (Baek, Meroni, & Manzini, 2015). A community with limited resources and premature organisational structure and therefore experience an unbalanced workload is fragile. If the community fails to distribute workloads fairly within and the commitment of the sacrificing members is exhausted, it is likely to fall apart. Inspired by the self- organization phenomena in nature, we designed a tool that these communities can use to conceive strategies that contribute to autonomy and collaboration. For validation, we applied the tool to an industrial design student club. The results demonstrate that despite the differences between social and ecological systems, there is a potential to learn from nature to design for self-organized collaborative communities with the condition that one has sufficient knowledge about both the references and the design target. We also discuss the problem-solving and learning effects of the tool.