The concept of Health Systems is ubiquitous in the healthcare literature. However, the question ‘what is a Health System’ is not easy to answer. The emerging field of Health Systems Design is by nature multi-disciplinary, involving several disciplines with different ontological commitments and diverse perspectives and interpretations of health and system. To avoid confusions in communication and facilitate engagement between the design and health communities, it is important to begin an open exploration of the fundamental concepts of Health Systems. This paper is a first step in that endeavour

Offering product-service systems instead of technical products is one way for companies to achieve a competitive advantage and stay viable in the future. This paper presents a workshop series created in cooperation between a manufacturer of wood processing production lines and a research institute for engineering design to develop PSS concepts for a plant. Using the finger jointing line as an example, the progress and results of the workshops are presented. Furthermore, it is discussed whether the workshop series is transferable to other products and industries.

The integration of Sensing Machine Elements (SME) is a promising approach to obtain reliable data about relevant process and state variables of technical systems. However, the quality and reliability of the provided data strongly depends on the corresponding calculation model of the SME and the therein included uncertainty. Consequently, in this contribution, the calculation model of a sensory utilized rolling bearing, as exemplary SME, is systematically analyzed using existing methods and tools to identify uncertainty that critically affects the quality and reliability of the data provided.

A central part of the design process is collaboration, harnessing specialist expertise often in meetings. We understand relatively little about how meetings serve teams of designers and their work and this study uses soft systems methodology to attempt to create structures that describe and explain meetings. The results suggest extension of the boundary of interest and suggest a conceptual framework which reveals some under-addressed stages and activities which may help designers improve their meetings.

For an efficient product family development an abstraction of concrete product variants is necessary in order to recognize and systematically describe characteristic properties of a variant. System architecture models represent a possibility for the systematic description of the product variety. The structure of architecture models for existing product families resembles a reverse engineering process, in which products have to be analyzed on their structures. This paper describes a reverse engineering approach for building up system architecture models as basis for developing product families.

It is important to be able to compare and evaluate different solutions early in development. This paper proposes a method for structuring historical data into a data model that can support the evaluation of new design concepts. The data is contextualized by linking it to a hierarchical decomposition of existing products. Two case studies were conducted to evaluate the value of using historical data when evaluating new concepts. The cases confirm that the proposed method is useful for evaluation of new concepts.