The haptic propositions derived from the textile prototypes often allow for more than one interpretation. It impacts the decision on design alternatives during the phase of design evaluation and validation. The present study aims to conquer this challenge with a haptic design case study of automotive upholstery fabric. It links experimental psychophysics with design decision-making. The study results show that visual cues influence haptic detection accuracy and constancy to choose a final design option.

Intercultural interactions encourage social inclusion and diversity, but they are often avoided due to prejudices. Intercultural Meaningful Social Interactions (IMSI) can overcome such prejudices; still, the literature lacks guidelines on how to promote them by Design. In this study, we propose eight design strategies to facilitate these interactions, which were originated by bridging four theories for prejudice reduction and exemplar IMSI experiences of 15 intercultural participants. This paper presents the strategies and discusses their use to inspire new design concepts for promoting IMSI.

There is a growing interest in design research to explore sustainable consumption via products that are cherished as they age. This paper presents an empirical study exploring the influence of patina (signs of surface aging) on consumers’ willingness to discard products and aesthetic appreciation. Results show participants are predisposed to discard everyday products regardless aesthetic qualities (patina). This implies designers should look beyond the presence of pure aesthetic qualities of aging and emphasise symbolic qualities of aging to stimulate appreciation as products age.

There has been an increasing interest in intergenerational activities where young people and older adults work together in the exchange of knowledge, new ideas, methodologies and ways of thinking. With the leading international climate change conference in Glasgow in Nov. 2021, this paper presents an intergenerational co-design COP26 project where co-design pairs designed and made Glasgow COP26 souvenirs, exhibited and sold them in a COP26 ‘pop-up’ shop. The project delivered important learning and teaching including project launch, studio sessions, external design reviews, and prototyping.

Shame is an emotion most of us are well familiar with and has taken an increasing role in public discourse in the last couple of years. While design literature has seen a strong tradition for evoking positive emotions, shame seems to be somewhat neglected. As a step towards a more practical understanding of shame in design, this article combines design literature with studies from other disciplines in an attempt to give an overview of designers' current notion of shame, and discuss if and how this notion could be further explored into concepts and tools that may benefit future designers.

The increasing availability of smart products creates a more pronounced need for designers to prototype and communicate interactive and environmental qualities of product during their design process. This paper explores which elements of User journey, Storyboards and Wireframes contribute to communicating these qualities, and how they might integrate with sketching. Results show depictions of user and temporal elements alongside low fidelity sketches are deemed most important. Our findings form the basis to propose and subsequently test combined prototyping approaches in future research.

A psychological experiment was conducted to explore the relationship between design features of physical controllers and perceived multiple meanings or possible operations by users. In particular, we focused on affordances and informatives, two semantic clues derived from product semantics, to find out how these clues affect users’ perceptions. The results indicated that both desired shapes, text, and icon could encourage and discourage the perception of specific operations. Those empirical data could be useful for product designers in communicating effectively with users through their products.

To indicate the effective team-building activities implemented independently by the students in a project-based learning class in higher education in Japan, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the students of the Design Project class held at a Japanese graduate school in 2020 and 2021. The interviewees are 12 students belonging to the top three teams regarding the evaluation of the final presentation. Based on the classifications of the comments, we indicate the best practices of team-building activities corresponding to the timing and team characteristics.

In new product development courses, engineering students are introduced to the tools for addressing the functional or technical issues of the product. Problems arise when they need to empathise with the user to better understand how the product can be used in different contexts. To address this problem, we propose the use of storyboards as a tool to explore user behaviour and to clarify functions of the future product. The study results confirmed that storyboards are a suitable tool for understanding user-product interaction, however, the several problems encountered by the participants were outlined.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges and opportunities for higher education and one of the important areas was online education. Especially in design field, Online Problem-Based Learning has emerged as a promising method. This paper explores the potential of online-PBL and how it can be developed through a prototype approach. An action research in Indian HEI shows insights regarding the potentiality of online-PBL and application of a prototype approach to educational development activities. A concept of “educational probes” was proposed as a method to design educational program.

The design process in most organizations is often collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature. Yet most institutions of higher learning do not offer students the opportunity to work in multidisciplinary teams. This study follows an experiential service-learning project over 3 years to explore the role of multidisciplinary project teams on design education outcomes. Findings suggest that the quality of designs improved over time and students consider experiential learning in multidisciplinary teams to be a valuable component in their education, increasing their job readiness upon graduation.

The integration of additive manufacturing processes into the teaching of students is an important prerequisite for the further dissemination of this new technology. In this context, the DfAM is of particular importance. For this reason, this paper presents an approach in which a connection is made between methodical product development and practical implementation by AM. Using a model racing car as an example, students independently develop significant improvements of particular assemblies. A final evaluation shows that the students have significantly improved their skills and competencies.

Most lectures in the field of engineering are held in a traditional teacher-centred and frontal lecture format. This means that all students receive the identical information at the same pace without taking their individual skills, knowledges and competences into account. A didactic concept, that fosters an individual learning experience and digitally provides personalised learning materials for each student is Adaptive E-Learning. Within this paper the development of an Adaptive E-Leaning Environment in the course Engineering Design at Ruhr-University Bochum is presented.

To face environmental requirements in the design area, it is crucial to work on the education of younger generation to sustainable design. But literature shows there is a growing need for both teachers and learners to develop pedagogical support to help the integration of sustainable concerns and tools in the education. This article focuses on Life Cycle Assessment in the scope of an ecodesign process. Through a case study, the aim is to illustrate it with firstly a succinct version of the LCA of an electric kettle and then suggestions of ecodesign strategies based on the outcomes of the LCA.

Spatial Thinking (ST) is an important part of reasoning. In contrast to Rigid ST (R-ST), Non-Rigid ST (NR-ST) has hardly been researched and tests do not exist, even though NR-ST is crucial for professions that deal with space and time such as engineering and design. Our study at 4 different universities confirms that R-ST does not predict performance in NR-ST; that performance in Non-Rigid ST is significantly lower than in R-ST; and that performance of students in later semesters is not better than in the first semesters. These results highlight the need for further research into NR-ST.

Universities struggle to commercialise scientific research. However, designers can help scientists bridge the research-market gap in different ways. Although the value design can bring to science is understood, how design outputs deliver value to scientific research remains unexplored. Our paper reports findings from a designer-scientist collaboration developing a graphene-based water desalination technology. By reflecting on this case study, we found that design outputs serve different purposes in developing technology and assist in progressing technology maturation efficiently.

Sustainable production transition requires new paradigms and strategies, as well as alternative materials. Recently, an increasing number of innovative materials were developed. Such novelties greatly affected the design practice, widening the materic possibilities for designed products. However, traditional material classification does not apply well for these new materials trend. In this paper, the authors cooperated with design students to identify an iterative tracing activity of the new material trends for design, finalised to embed in the same work new tendencies that may rise in future.

Although testing is critical in industries, the general approaches of testing in engineering design are under-represented in academia. This research investigates the current state of testing based on design textbooks. The findings suggest there is no clear definition of testing. Testing appears in different design stages with adjacent concepts such as prototyping, experimentation, verification, and validation. The processes of testing and its role within engineering design are ambiguous. Recommendations to design educators are provided, and the limitations of the study are discussed.

Design education increasingly blends technology learning with sociotechnical challenges, but little is understood about how students simultaneously engage with both of these elements. In this preliminary study, we describe the results of two offerings of a design course focusing on disaster response at a major public research institution. We present a preliminary analysis of 52 students’ course reflections suggesting that sociotechnical challenges uniquely contextualize technology during project-based learning, presenting promising opportunities for future design education and research study.

Teamwork quality (TWQ) is often associated with project success. Therefore, understanding TWQ is crucial to have better design project outcomes. Since most of the studies in the past have presented a cross-sectional analysis of TWQ, the current work focuses on capturing TWQ in a longitudinal way for a project-based learning (PBL) course. The results showed that the 6 facets differed significantly during the first half of the course than towards the end. In later phases of the PBL, TWQ and team performance were positively correlated than at the beginning.