This study explores the alignment between automotive design innovation and consumer acceptance, particularly in the context of two significant trends: electrification and digitalization. We probed the acceptance of replacing rear window with wide-angle camera We surveyed 1,546 potential customers from China and Sweden to assess their openness to such a radical design. Findings suggest a consensus on its futuristic appeal but diverge in adoption willingness. The study offers insights to bridge the design preference gap, positioning customer acceptance as key for car design strategy.

This paper discusses the C-K theory approach and developing templates for student's use in design courses, specifically for the conceptual design phase. Examples of C-K templates are reviewed to demonstrate the process leading to a design solution. Analysis of student's work using these templates are presented and discussed with respect to design learning attributes and design innovation during the conceptual design. Student reflections from their final design reports indicated that students did develop knowledge and skills in bio-inspired design, collaboration, and interdisciplinary mindsets.

This work presents a Set-Based Design inspired approach for generation, evaluation and reduction of a solution space of alternative product concepts. Also, the aspect of how to implement the process in an industrial environment was investigated. The hypothesis, confirmed by case studies, is that it can be done using existing methods like Enhanced functional modelling, brainwriting, the Gallery method, Axiomatic Design, causal diagrams and Pugh matrices. The method can be successfully introduced in a timeframe of a few working days and support development engineers in the concept design phase.

Sketch2Prototype is an AI-based framework that transforms a hand-drawn sketch into a diverse set of 2D images and 3D prototypes through sketch-to-text, text-to-image, and image-to-3D stages. This framework, shown across various sketches, rapidly generates text, image, and 3D modalities for enhanced early-stage design exploration. We show that using text as an intermediate modality outperforms direct sketch-to-3D baselines for generating diverse and manufacturable 3D models. We find limitations in current image-to-3D techniques, while noting the value of the text modality for user-feedback.

Mental Imagery is a focus for design cognition research, with most research focusing on visual mental imagery, it has been highlighted that mental imagery encompasses more aspects than visual, including emotion known as multimodal mental imagery. So as researchers and educators we need to understand the cognitive process and how to best stimulate it. This paper looks at design students use of visual and emotional mental imagery and its impact on their ability to produce creative outcomes during the ideation stage of the design process.

Software implementations of traditional engineering design methods can potentially enrich the original methods. A study was conducted to better understand how concept generation can be facilitated using software. Participants of the study were asked to generate concepts using either specialized software, or by using traditional means, for applying function-means modeling and morphological matrices. A concept concretization metric was used to evaluate the results, which indicated that there are both positive and negative aspects of performing concept generation using specialized software.

Gestures are a preferred mode of interaction for smartwatches and these are commonly elicited either by expert/designers or by users. This paper aims to understand the most promising approach for generating and assessing gestures by employing two empirical studies to validate a set of expert/designer-generated gestures. It further gains insights into the users' mental models, their role as co-creators, and their considerations for one-handed gestures in smartwatches, and discusses the virtue of incorporating both approaches of gesture elicitation.

Improving existing products plays a vital role in enhancing customer satisfaction and coping with changes in the market. Analyzing user experience (UX) to find the deficiencies of existing products and establishing improved schemes is the key to UX-driven product improvement, especially at the conceptual design stage. Although some tools used in conceptual design, such as requirements analysis and knowledge reasoning, have advanced recently, they lack targeted goals and sufficient efficiency in identifying insufficient product attributes and improving existing functions and structures. The challenge lies in considering the influence imposed on design activities by the original product features (including attributes, functions, and structure). In this study, a knowledge-enabled approach and framework that integrates the conceptual design process, online reviews for UX, and knowledge is proposed to support product improvement. Specifically, a decision-making algorithm based on UX analysis is proposed to identify to-be-improved product attributes. Then, through optimizing the previous knowledge application model from knowledge requirement transformation, knowledge modeling, and knowledge reasoning, a smart knowledge reasoning model is established to push knowledge for functional solving of the to-be-improved attributes. A knowledge configuration method is used to modify product features to generate an improved scheme. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study of improving an agricultural sprayer is conducted. Through discussion, this study can help to regulate design activities for product improvement, enhance data and knowledge application, and promote divergent thinking during scheme modification.

This paper reports a systematic literature review with the aim of determining the role of stimuli and other factors, such as timing, the designers’ background, expertise, and experience, in the idea generation phase of conceptual design related to engineering and industrial design and architecture. “Stimulus” is a general expression for a source of information characterized by several features, including the source (internal or external), analogical distance (near or far), and form (textual, visual, or other). Several recent studies have been conducted on this topic involving neurophysiological measurements with significant results. This comprehensive review will help to determine if the neurophysiological results are consistent with those from protocol studies. This allows for determining how the features of stimuli affect – among the related factors – designers’ performance in idea generation. The literature search was carried out using the Snowball and PRISMA methods. A total of 72 contributions were selected from studies adopting protocol analysis or neurophysiological measurements. This study presents a framework to support the selection of stimuli most likely to maximize performance, based on the designer's background and expertise in the different idea generation metrics. The main findings of the framework suggest that visual stimuli enhance the creative performance of designers, regardless of their background, while textual stimuli foster the variety and quality of ideas, but only in engineering and industrial designers. Comparing the findings, the resulting framework reveals aspects of stimuli that require further investigation. These can be considered valuable insights for new directions for design research.

Renewable energy is increasingly used and promoted. In the UK, for example, large scale renewable energy farms have been used to supply electricity with great effect. Given the large number of homes, there is considerable impact to be made by small scale residential renewable energy systems. Despite solar panels being the most common form of residential renewable energy technology, only 4% of buildings in the UK support solar technology of any kind. For direct electricity generation, silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) arrays are the most utilised, and when used in a residential setting, they are typically mounted on the sloped roofs. This is where the problem lies. The technology comes with a high cost, and there is further financial burden of installation and maintenance, making solar energy inaccessible for many UK homeowners. This paper presents a research and design innovation project to make PV technology more accessible in the UK. Edge Solar, the innovative, affordable, new PV system concept for UK homes may become a promising solution to significantly improve the accessibility to the PV technology and renewable energy at the household level in the UK and beyond with further development and commercialisation.

Product architecture decisions are made early in the product development process and have far-reaching effects. Unless anticipated through experience or intuition, many of these effects may not be apparent until much later in the development process, making changes to the architecture costly in time, effort, and resources. Many researchers through the years have studied various elements of product architecture and their effects. By aggregating observations on the effects of architecture strategies from a selection of the literature on the topic and storing them in a systematic data set, this information can be recalled in a matrix structure which allows for the identification, comparison and evaluation, and then selection of the most desirable product architecture strategies before expending resources along any development path. This paper introduces this matrix, referred to as the Product Architecture Strategy and Effect (PASE) Matrix, how to construct one, and a demonstration of its use.

This research investigates changes in team behavior and communication through interruptions and gestures, due to design process strategies in pre-formed remote teams for conceptual design tasks. Understanding creative remote team behavior is important due to the increase of remote communication in knowledge work. Teams were given a creative or analytical condition intervention to facilitate their conceptual design team process. The research contributes to the human-computing interaction literature by characterizing changes in distributed team behavior due to process method interventions. The creative condition exhibited a decrease in interruptions. The analytical condition exhibited a decrease in gestures and an increase in problem characterization at the cost of ideation discussion. Remote team members can better gauge which meetings or work tasks are best to be done in person or remotely by gauging not just the task but also the team behavior.

Patents are an invaluable source of data that can be beneficial for Engineering Design (ED). Patenting is one of the main means for disclosing the inventive process. For this reason, the description of the problem solved should also be included in any patents.

The ED literature lacks a proper definition of a problem, resulting in a fragmented scenario. Prior studies have employed Text Mining (TM) to extract problems from patents. We argue that TM can assist ED researchers in understanding how problems are articulated in text. Based on the literature, we propose two hypotheses: (1) problem-related text exhibits a negative sentiment polarity compared to other sections of patents; (2) problem-related keywords identified in the literature are predominantly used to describe problems rather than other aspects.

We analyse Japanese patents to validate our hypotheses, since they explicit Problem and Solution in the abstract. Finally, we compare our results with a set of problem-related sentences extracted from USPTO patents.

Our study reveals a higher positive sentiment in problem-related sentences compared to solution-related ones and highlights the inadequacy of using problem-related keywords alone to differentiate between the two.

Product-service systems (PSS) are one of the business models that can promote circular economy and sustainability; however, to design this kind of solution, holistic approaches must be used, integrating different areas of knowledge. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual solution based on the PSS business model to the problem of reverse logistics of coffee capsules, through the application of the Requirements Engineering method for Sustainable PSS design, with a focus on the initial phase. With an emphasis on the business model and value proposition, a conceptual solution was developed to promote the circularity of the capsule chain based on the analysis of the main stakeholders' needs. The value proposition of the PSS solution for the issue of coffee capsules was described as the “cocreation of sustainable value to stakeholders to foster the circularity of the chain”, considering consumer involvement through education and rewards in product disposal processes. The results reinforce the need to integrate critical stakeholders to add the desired value in creating a sustainable PSS solution and the need to pivot the business model during the solution development process.

Chronobiology is the science that studies the role of time in biology. The study of time in human bodies revealed the presence of internal rhythms related to the time of day. Considering divergent thinking as one of the essential cognitive activities of conceptual design, this paper presents the results of investigating the effect of time of day on designers’ brain activity while performing divergent thinking tasks. An experiment was run with a revised Alternative Uses Task, measuring brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. Students with different educational backgrounds were recruited for this experiment, including engineering and industrial design students, to determine if the time of day affected them differently. The brain waves and related power results show significant differences with respect to the time of day and educational background. The differences are particularly evident considering the interaction of these factors. Further studies are required to understand the relationship between the differences detected and the designers’ behavioural performance and to identify which time of day is most effective for idea-generation activities for designers.

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used in engineering design in different ways. It has the potential to enhance some design aspects, such as visualization and interaction, but might be incapable of solving the others. There are no consensus or general guidelines on how VR can facilitate design processes. This paper aims to understand how VR is currently used in engineering design at an early stage, so that researchers and practitioners can better know when and how to use VR for efficient design activities. Specifically, this paper reviews the research questions and applications addressed by using VR technology. The study helps identify the design questions currently studied, and gaps to be filled in order to use VR effectively for optimal design outcomes. This review also provides guidelines about when and how to use VR in design research and practices.

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.

Social augmentation refers to a human-computer integration technology that aims to enhance the user's social skills by supporting empathy, interaction and communication. This study investigated the implementation of social augmentation in hearing protection within the context of entertainment. Through a user-centred analysis, potential social augmentation functions for earplugs were conceived. Three innovative conceptual prototypes were then developed, each enriched with three social functions. Accordingly, each of these concepts should ensure that social skill is enhanced, facilitated or improved. To assess whether the concepts were successful, the social impact of the prototypes on the user and bystanders was evaluated and compared through questionnaires and focus groups using video footage. The results provided promising conclusions regarding the applied methodology and the potential for optimizing the iteration process of innovative human augmentation concepts.

Design is a highly nonlinear chaotic dynamic process with many possible solutions, which requires enormous knowledge for designers. This paper investigates how environment-based design (EBD) methodology can help designers use only necessary knowledge for their creativity based on three methods: information search, knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. The methods are applied in an aircraft pylon design, which is evaluated by two aerospace design specialists. The paper discussed the different roles of EBD for novice and expert designers in regard to overcoming emotion and knowledge barriers to achieving designer creativity.

Although still in its infancy, the Hyperloop project aims to develop a new type of public transport. The concept is to send a capsule, called “pod”, at about 1000km/h in a vacuum tube that would connect two places separated by 500km. One issue is that the pod will be windowless and travel inside a tube made of steel which will influence passenger comfort. This article brings together various domains to explore the different characteristics that can influence the travel experience. As the Hyperloop concept is still in an early stage of development, methods for analyzing the interior design of transportation vehicles, such as Kansei Engineering, Mayr's circle, and the comfort model by Looze have been proposed. Moreover, typical characteristics, such as “Environment”, “Running Factors” and “Service & Installation” have been discussed with respect to “passengers” experience, comfort and safety.