Early phases of the design process require designers to select into view elements of the problem that they deem important. This exploration process is commonly referred to as problem framing and is essential to solution generation. There have recently been calls in the literature for more precise representations of framing activity and how individual designers come to negotiate shared frames in team settings. This paper presents a novel research approach to understand design framing activity using a system thinking lens. Systems thinking is the way that we understand a system’s components and the interrelations to create interventions, which can be used to move the system outcomes in a more favorable direction. The proposed approach is based on the observation that systems as mental representations of the problem bear some similarity to frames as collections of concepts implicit in the designer’s cognition. Systems mapping – a common visualization tool used to facilitate systems thinking – could then be used to model external representations of framing, made explicit through speech, and sketches. We thus adapt systems mapping to develop a coding scheme to analyze verbal protocols of design activity to retrospectively represent framing activity. The coding scheme is applied on two distinct datasets. The resulting system maps are analyzed to highlight team problem frames, individual contributions, and how the framing activity evolves over time. This approach is well suited to visualize the framing activity that occurs in open-ended problem contexts, where designers are more focused on problem finding and analysis rather than concept generation and detailed design. Several future research avenues for which this approach could be used or extended, including using new computational methods, are presented.

The paper explores the integration of emotional design elements in the development of medical devices to enhance user acceptance and adherence. It emphasizes the importance of a user-centered approach, acknowledging both functional and emotional needs. The study compares two cases within healthcare design, highlighting the impact of emotional design on users' perception of medical devices. Despite the different stages of development in the two cases, both employed a higher level of refflective design, aiming to create a lasting impact on users' identity using the products.

This paper explores the concept of 'playables,' defined as tangible objects intentionally designed for immersive play, distinct from traditional utilitarian objects. It delves into how playables, unlike everyday items, transcend functionality, fostering creativity and curiosity in immersive play. It explores how playables differ from acknowledged design principles, drawing upon Dieter Rams and Don Norman. By recognizing the need for distinct design perspectives for playables, the paper contributes to unlocking their potential to enable wonder in immersive play experiences.

Inertial motion capture has garnered considerable attention within the manufacturing industry for ergonomic assessments due to high reliability and fewer constraints compared to alternative posture tracking direct measurement tools. However, these wearable systems, while ensuring reliability and precision in the results, also introduce a degree of invasiveness. Hence, user experience becomes an important aspect for design and development of such systems. This paper reveals major user experience issues resulting from an experimental study for promoting user-centred design of wearable systems.

In this study, the relationship between user experience, product appearance and emotional impressions generated by the user are examined through electric concept cars introduced by automotive companies in motor shows. The focus of the research is on the measurement of the emotional experiences that the interior design of the electric concept cars awakens in the user. The main purpose of the study is to open a discussion on the relation between the emotional impressions and product appearance.

This study explores the application of image generative AI to support design process by creating inspiration boards. Through an evaluative study, we compare the diversity, quantity, fidelity, and ambiguity of boards generated by image generative AI and traditional methods. The results highlight how generative AI produces a quantity of images, it exhibits limited diversity compared to traditional methods. This suggests a tendency for supporting interpolation rather than extrapolation of ideas, in turn providing insights on best practice and into the optimal stage for its application.

Robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in the workplace. As Industry 5.0 pursues human-centric technologies, a greater understanding of what effects aesthetics has on those interacting with robots is needed. This paper sets out robot morphology as a way to characterise key form types, and proposes seven classifications: anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, phytomorphism, artemorphism, functiomorphism, amorphism, and neomorphism. Through an assessment of the current robot aesthetic landscape, design dimensions are identified with examples that can inform future robot design.

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.

With the paradigm shift towards Industry 4.0 and digitalisation, manufacturing engineers face several unexplored challenges; in the products for which they are designing production, in the equipment they are designing to realise production systems and in the digitalisation impact on engineering processes. Today's manufacturing system design processes are still based on traditional engineering methods and have difficulties to cope with increased complexity. The aim of this systematic literature review is to explore drivers and barriers to implement digitalisation in engineering processes from a socio-technical perspective. The identified general barriers were cyber security, lack of competence, lack of standards, large investments and resistance to change. For the engineering processes the main drivers were increased product complexity, servitisation, data driven design and engineering productivity, with the main barriers culture, excess amount of data, integration of tools. cyber security and data quality. The study shows the complexity of the challenge, and that it is not only the technology that is the top barrier. Further research is recommended to develop approaches of successful engineering digitalisation implementations.

The perceived complexity of a product (product complexity) is doubtless an influential phenomenon in a design project. Insight into this factor and how it can be measured, is key to understanding its influence, supporting project planning and resource demand estimation. Opinions on product complexity vary greatly, with many definitions, scales and techniques to measure product complexity available; many of which draw their conclusions from engineering design research. Yet the field of product (or industrial) design companies, whose designers work across a vast range of product types, from domestic to industrial remains under researched. These designers have a tacit understanding of many influences over their projects, of which product complexity is one.

This paper presents an analysis of the dimensions (or measures) of product complexity found in literature and compares its findings to the measures defined by practicing product designers. This paper will demonstrate the process used to identify these dimensions and the scales developed to assess product complexity in a practical way and will make conclusions on the perspectives held on product complexity by product designers.

This research aims to investigate the incorporation of anamorphism into product design and has resulted in the creation of a series of handheld objects with embedded anamorphic information. Anamorphism is a phenomenon typically applied to images, where it appears distorted from all but one angle. Often associated with optical illusions, its history and viability for application to product design are reviewed. This includes an assessment of different designs’ impact on the overall recognition of hidden anamorphic objects, focusing on their design attributes to determine the best at concealment. With the creation of 3D anamorphic objects, experiments were conducted to allow correlations between object visibility and design features to be identified. Analysis of the results showed that objects with vertically stretched text and wider cuts within the characters were hardest to recognise and therefore more secure. Objects with the least material made it more difficult to interpret the hidden information from positions that were not the “privileged viewing zone”. The creation of these anamorphic objects highlighted that this function of anamorphism is possible and could be incorporated within products in future.

The replacement of conventional material with recyclates affects product personality, particularly regarding sustainability aspects influencing consumer behaviour. A definition of personality for products made of recyclates is missing in literature. As these products require appropriate aesthetics based on material origin to communicate the advantage concerning sustainability, there is a need for research in this regard. This paper aims to develop an adequate personality of a reusable water bottle made of ocean plastic by collecting personality traits that evoke associations related to the material's origin and sustainability. We conducted two quantitative field studies. Study 1 collected associated visual perceived attributes and context-related personality traits in order to develop and visualize a preliminary design. Study 2 evaluated the design regarding associated personality traits. The overall outcome was a product personality scale consisting of 23 items plus a concrete design recommendation for a water bottle made of recycled ocean plastic. The assessment of degree of sustainability was strongly influenced by participants’ associations with personal use, familiarity with usage and the factor of stability and resilience.

Emerging visualisation tools based on eXtended Reality (XR) platforms offer designers new possibilities and benefits, attracting increasing interest from academia and industry. However, as the users and consumers of these tools, practising designers' perceptions of XR visualisation tools need to be further verified as they shape the tools' acceptance and integration in the industry. This paper investigates industrial designers' acceptance of VR visualisation tools using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 designers from 3 countries to discuss their attitudes, motivations, experiences, and expectations regarding adopting VR visualisation tools as professional tools. The study highlights key opportunities to promote VR integration in industrial design as the tools' practical capabilities to support design performance and the social influence of stakeholders and peer designers on the professional use of VR. The main barriers lie in designers' expected effort to learn and use the tools and the investment and upkeep of VR systems and facilities in the industry. The paper concludes with recommendations for reaping benefits and overcoming barriers.

The maker movement has garnered interest from many disparate fields, from engineering to business management, to behavioural science, to city planning. The reason for this interest no doubt stems from the promised potential of the maker movement to revolutionize not only product creation and manufacturing, but in extension the economy around it. This paper examines existing literature across disciplines for evidence of what the maker movement has achieved so far, with a focus on implications for the field of Industrial Design.

The well-thought implementation of technology within the product-service system (PSS) will undoubtedly contribute to the increase of healthy life expectancy and to the improvement of the wellbeing of society. The ‘Exercise-Well’ project, explored the problem and solution areas related to home-based exercise through digital interventions. Students worked in pairs and expected to propose a PSS solution providing a type of sports/physical activities for individuals to support their wellbeing. The proposed solutions were encouraged to create positive change especially through the integration of self-determination theory (SDT), but also be functionality suited to the persona. The project had the goals of directing students: i) to learn how digital technologies can be best tailored to assist people to exercise; ii) to consider engineering and healthcare domain constraints for utilizing convenient technological methods and integrating relevant hardware and software components; and iii) to motivate people by integrating autonomy, competence, relatedness into their design proposals. The paper demonstrated how SDT can be integrated into the design process, and how home-based digital exercise interventions can lead to creative solutions.

Due to the continuous progress in information technology, complex problems of machine elements can be investigated using numerical methods. The focus of these investigations and optimizations often aims to reduce the stresses that occur or to increase the forces and torques that can be transmitted. Interference fit connections are an essential machine element for drive technology applications and are characterized by their economical fabrication. The transmission of external loads over a large contact surface between the shaft and hub makes it less vulnerable to impact loads. These advantages contrast with disadvantages such as the limited transmittable power, the risk of friction fatigue, and stress peaks at the hub edges, which can lead to undesirable and sudden failure, especially in the case of brittle hub materials. Analytical approaches already exist for optimizing these connections, which are expensive, time-consuming, and complex, so a high degree of expert knowledge is required to apply these methods in practice successfully. This paper presents a novel method using the example of optimizing the pressure distribution in the interface of a shrink-fit connection.

One difficulty with sketching pedagogy is the tendency to assess growth according to outcomes, as opposed to processes. We assessed eye gaze patterns between advanced and intermediate design sketchers and anticipated correlations between eye-gaze practices and sketching proficiency. Participants sketched two different objects using analogue materials, a potted plant from memory, and a MacBook from observation.

The study utilised Tobii 3 adjustable eye-tracking glasses and Tobii Pro data processing software. Twenty-five design sketching students and six design sketching instructors participated in the study.

Metrics measured include the quantity of reference line gazes, eye movement during line creation (targeting vs tracking), eye fixation duration, work checks per minute and subject gazes per minute.

The results show a difference in gaze patterns between intermediate and advanced sketchers, both in terms of practice and consistency. Eye-tracking sketching behaviours has revealed a new understanding of how teaching gaze habits could lead to improved methods of design sketching instruction.

The selection of an analogical source is a critical step in the design-by-analogy process. Previous researchers have explored the reasons and preferences of individual designers or design teams in selecting analogical sources. Non-designers, who instead have more knowledge of other fields, may offer new possibilities for retrieving novel analogical sources. This study focuses on differences in the selection of analogical sources between collaborative design teams composed of designers and nondesigners. There are indeed significant differences in the selection of the source type, the reasons for selecting the source, the level of abstraction in inspiration stimuli, and the novelty of design ideas between designers and non-designers. This work may provide theoretical guidance for the development of collaborative design tools and methods for teams composed of designers and non-designers with different knowledge bases.

Testing prototypes with intended end users is critical to the design process. There is limited research on testing prototypes with certain types of end users, specifically children for toy products. Additionally, prototypes evolve in fidelity throughout a project, adding to the complexity in developing best practices for prototype testing. This paper analyzes children's understanding of physical prototypes at various levels of fidelity throughout a university semester-long design project developing wooden toys. Through analyzing students’ feedback on their prototype testing sessions, aspects of the prototypes that aid or inhibit children from understanding both form and function are uncovered. These aspects relate to Norman's principles of interaction and their inclusion in prototypes, specifically mental models, signifiers, and affordances. This paper suggests to include these principles in prototypes early in development to guide the user during testing. The goal of this research is to be a resource for those developing products for children, as well as adding knowledge around prototyping testing at various levels of fidelity.

Mixed Reality (MR) technologies are widely available and applied in a variety of design and engineering applications. MR prototypes capture the respective benefits of physical and digital prototypes by merging these domains saving the time and resources required to create them. This advantage is compelling in the context of design education where tight time and resource constraints exist. However, it is known that new digital prototyping tools can cause problems for students applying appropriate prototyping tools during practice-based studio design projects. Our paper contributes a systematic appraisal of MR prototyping's proposed dimensions value against constraints and issues in design studio education. This highlights MR Visualisation and Knowledge Management dimensions as most readily realised in education. Recommendations are then reflected on via an illustrative case study into the implementation of MR prototyping via these dimensions. Reflections corroborate the value proposition, but also highlight a need for further research exploring activities to scaffold MR prototyping to further support reflective design thinking.