This paper demonstrates the importance of individual work in collaborative design meetings based on Granger’ causality and discusses how this impacts design tools and methodologies.

Based on Tucker's et al. CIAO model of globally collaborative work which allows distinguishing the main modes of interaction during a meeting, our research identifies the patterns or sequences of those interaction modes according to the Granger causality concept. Granger causality makes it possible to identify a temporal precedence of events without necessarily implying causality.

The results show that individual work plays a key role in achieving collaborative work. However, other factors such as the nature of the meetings and the objectives pursued also influence the sequences of interaction of the different modes.

These first results allow making recommendations on collaborative work methodologies and support mechanisms for collaboration. For instance, the ability of digital devices to facilitate the simultaneous individual work of participants in a collective space is a key factor and the ability to preserve sequences for individual work during a design meeting should be monitored to keep global efficiency.

Understanding heuristics and cognitive biases might lessen their impact since they can cause decision errors. From the responses to the survey for case studies, this study aims to investigate the fundamental understanding of heuristics and cognitive biases in engineering students and junior engineers from Germany and Thailand. The results indicated that the majority of participants knew very little about them. In a brief lecture, only few students from Germany knew about them. They had less of an impact on students who already knew them than on those who did not. However, engineers were unaware of them and are able to limit their effects. That implies that they can manage cognitive biases' effects without being aware of them. Therefore, experience is another crucial element in lessening the impact of biases. The behavior can also impact how much cognitive biases influence decision-making. Culture and environment affect the way of thinking. Although the finding suggests that knowledge is not the primary element in decreasing the impact of heuristics and cognitive biases, it is still vital to explain and further study the level of knowledge and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer to determine how they may have an impact.

During engineering design, different representations are used to convey information about a systems' components, functionality, spatial layout, and interdependencies. These varying representations may have an impact on the interpretation of a system and consequently the decision-making process. This paper presents a research study that tries to capture these different interpretations by investigating how designers divide a system into subsystem clusters. These subsystem clusters can be considered partitions of a set-in combinatorial mathematics. Given designers' subsystem clusters for three products across three representation modalities, three different analysis methods for finding the most likely partition from observed data are presented. Analysis shows that the Variation of Information analysis method gives the most coherent and consistent results for the search of a most likely cluster. In addition, differences in clustering behaviour are observed based on representation modality. These results show that the way an engineer or designer chooses to represent a system impacts how that system is interpreted, which has implications for the decision-making process during engineering design.

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.

How does the quantity and quality of innovation in an organization vary with the architecture of the product that the organization produces is a recurring theme in literature. This paper attempts to answer this question in quantitative terms and establishes an empirical relationship. While establishing this relationship, this paper also finds objective and quantitative expressions both for the product architecture and innovation in such a way that both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of innovation are accounted for. In this process three new formulations, which can be calculated using the data available in public domain, have been established for architectural modularity, architectural complexity and innovativeness of an idea respectively.These formulations have been verified by collecting innovation data in an automobile manufacturing company and analyzing it from the perspective of architecture and innovation. Finally, the relatioships between architectural parameters and innovativeness have been explored. Implications include the type of architecture more amenable to innovation, the impact of innovation on architectural complexity and a methodological contribution to operationalizing innovation.

Innovative products can be highly prospective and apt to disrupt usages profoundly. They can lead to multiple long-term social impacts influencing people's way of life and behaviour. So it is necessary to anticipate them without delay. Due to high uncertainty, designers may face the problem that conventional user-centred methods, which assess design performances from today's users, are not adapted. We think sociologists can help characterise the likely social impacts of future products. So we propose an original framework called the Representation-Usage-Impact (RUI) method to stimulate sociologists' projection and capture relevant knowledge about probable social impacts. The method includes a database structure encoding the knowledge of sociologists for further use in the design process. Its goal is to help designers avoid making choices today that may be regretted in decades. We illustrate the method and its process with the design of autonomous vehicle scenarios, as it will likely bring many new usages in the future. As the method is still under construction, we present an intermediate validation step involving sociologists. The first results suggest that the method might be a safeguard for the design of disruptive products.

While products get more challenging to repair, the right-to-repair movement aims to empower consumers in their ability to “use, modify, and repair” a device “whenever, wherever, and however” they want. Here, the best design practices and remaining challenges of three industrial sectors – namely, consumer electronics, biomedical devices, and clothing industry – are investigated in light of the right-to-repair movement. Based on literature reviews and industrial surveys, a SWOT analysis is provided for each sector, and sustainable implications for product repair readiness are drawn. Concretely, recommendations to design, develop and sell products with right-to-repair in mind are given by sector. Future directions for a more quantitative assessment and implementation of design for product repair are discussed to ensure the augmentation of the circularity and sustainability performance of products.

In global competition, companies are continuously searching for a competitive advantage. A growing number of companies have identified the design of their products as a major success factor. The promises for companies associated with outstanding design are extremely attractive, ranging from better customer experience to higher sales growth. But even though the advantages of design seem to be compelling, companies are still having difficulties in leveraging the benefits of design.

In this paper, we want to identify the underlying challenges that explain this gap. We are especially interested in the role and challenges of design in interdisciplinary product development. Therefore, we perform a literature review that clarifies terminology, analyses research approaches and identifies challenges. We determine seven key challenges for design in interdisciplinary product development. Furthermore, we observe a limited scope of research approaches in the reviewed literature. Based on these findings, we propose three further research directions to strengthen the role of design in interdisciplinary product development in the future.

This paper reports the preliminary findings from ongoing research on the potential role of storytelling as an analytical framework in assessing a research project. It is noted that most existing research on storytelling in science is focused on science communication. There is limited research on storytelling as an analytical tool for analyzing and synthesizing research plans and design. This research is based on the premise that the assessment of a research project and design is based on reviewing one or the other form of research communication, whether it is a research plan, a research report, or a presentation. Thus, the assessment is mediated by how well the research plan, proposal, report, or presentation, communicates the research to the reviewer and how well it connects the dots. The reported findings are based on studies with two different storytelling frameworks applied to assess research representations made by doctoral researchers as part of their annual research progress review. The paper reports the details of the research approach, the empirical study, and preliminary findings from the collected data.

The emergence of intermediary platforms created networks that facilitate peer-to-peer interactions, as well as encourage the sharing of goods and services within the context of collaborative consumption and cost saving. This article sets out to inspect “why the sharing economy is so successful” and provide a critical viewpoint on the topic's essential ideas, while also taking a perspective on the advantages and disadvantages that affect the end users. A literature review paired with case studies of Airbnb, Uber, and other applications of the shared economy, looks upon how despite their rapid market growth in the past decade and public approval, such platforms caused disruptions to the markets they operate in. Results indicate that by being involved as a part of the collaborative consumption ecosystem, either as a provider or a user, the absence of personal ownership is key, while the utilisation of the product needs to be maximised to result in a pleasant experience. However, it is critical that the development of these platforms which thrive on connecting people stays closely monitored by regulatory bodies, and that the legislation needed for prevention of unethical practices follows quickly enough to ensure rightful operation.

Situatedness in design suggest that designing is situated within the design process or the cognitive actions taken by the designer, the designer's expertise and know-how, the designer's experience generally and the interactions in the specific design task being undertaken as well as the interactions with the design artefact generated. In this paper, we analyzed the situatedness of design concepts generated by teams of professional engineers during a design task. The method combines protocol analysis, Natural Language Processing and network theory to provide a representation and a measurement of design situatedness overtime. Providing empirical evidence of the situatedness of concepts has been overlooked in design research. The method and results presented in this paper outlines the foundation to empirically explore design situatedness.

This study is grounded upon the cognitive process and knowledge representation, analyzes the differences in perceptions between designers and users by applying schema theory. Per design process, we disassembled the semantic words that represent the design concept, and re-construct the representative visual imagery library. We experimented the imagery library with selective designers and users, and through their selections of the images, we uncovered: 1. The differences largely exist in concept interpretation and imagery selection between designers and users, which has strong relationship with their different schema; 2. The experiment revealed the fact that designers are inclined to understand the concept by disassembling the elements, and have obvious tendency of professionalism, while users’ interpretation prefers complete forms and life-oriented; 3. As compared with users, designers relatively prefer brand-new, creative elements in selecting visualized representation.

To encourage creativity through ideation mode in design thinking, we conducted three workshops dealing with regional challenges with 44 participants. The systematic feedback method applied to the workshops supports the multi-disciplinary participants to feedback during the ideation mode to diverge ideas from diverse perspectives. The method is composed of feedback cards and the process of using them. Two kinds of cards encourage communication within the team. The next three cards aim to diverge the viewpoints of the feedback systematically to support the team to imagine the possibility of the idea evolving from a bird's eye view.

Through quantitative analysis of the survey, we identified the significant and positive correlations between acceptance of the team's idea and team creativity, the effectiveness of the method on team creativity, and the team's characteristics that firmly realized the effect of the method. By categorizing the free comments, we indicated the valid functions and improvements that need further research in the future. Identified valid functions were not only diverging minds and perspectives but encouraging communication and understanding of the team members leading to acceptance and creativity.

The T-Shaped designer has previously been identified as a design engineer with the desirable set of skills for a successful career. Twelve design engineers ranging from novice to expert, were interviewed to gain an understanding of their skill set, how it has evolved and how it needs to evolve in order to be futureproofed. With the use of qualitative, quantitative data and the development of a novel engineering skills profiling method, this paper found that 75% of design engineers did not exhibit a T-shaped skill profile, but a skill shape that has been termed ‘M-shaped’ or ‘Comb-shaped’. The majority of participants exhibited a great depth of specialist skills in multiple disciplines, not limited to their immediate field of work. All participants exhibited a wide knowledge of skills that allowed them to work across different disciplines, which included electronics, management or manufacturing, and so the wide vertical bar of the T-Shape design predicted by previous literature has been supported.

At the end of its life the packaging may become a residue if it is not correctly discarded, becoming a visible component of the waste produced on the planet, with a defined shape and communicating with the world. In the same way, large-scale agricultural production generates organic residues that, although representing fiber-rich materials, are discarded, such as rice husk, coconut husk, wood fibers, among others. To contribute with solutions to minimize the environmental impact of packaging and organic residues, the present study aims at performing preliminary tests of molded pulp packaging manufacturing from organic residues, in a circular economy context. Action research was used as the method to guide the collective construction (project team and partner companies), and the direction of the preliminary tests of packaging to be manufactured. The tests performed on coconut fibers in transfer molding and thermoforming were promising, but they required the addition of binder substances like byproducts from starch, especially in the transfer molding method. Besides using fibers from alternative sources to cellulose, the proposed packaging is potentially compostable and may replace non-renewable material like oil-based polymers.

In sustainable experience design education, experience activities of consumers and users, design activities of student designers, and education activities of instructors should be addressed. It would be meaningful to compare various sustainable experience design education efforts considering regional and cultural context. This paper describes a framework where experience, design and education activities are systematically represented with diverse contexts also represented in a structured manner. Student design projects in a service design thinking course are illustrated where sustainability is gently introduced.

Remote and virtual centers have been studied for the past twenty years as an alternative to the traditional air traffic control tower environment. Designing such complex sociotechnical systems requires a systems engineering approach that appropriately integrates the human element as well as the technological and organizational components. In this paper, we identify the challenges of implementing this human-systems integration in the design of complex systems. We present the feedback we obtained from a series of semi-structured interviews with people involved in the development of military air traffic solutions. The participants' responses helped us establish methodological guidelines for designing and building a disruptive remote and virtual air traffic control center. We discuss how virtualized human- in-the-loop simulations in particular should help designers analyze user activity and be more flexible in system acquisition.

When viewing a product for the first time, a consumer's aesthetic perception is based on their knowledge of other products, artefacts, and concepts. These mental images function as visual references for consumers and affect the processing fluency of the new product. Designers frequently use visual references as inspiration during the research stage of the design process. It has been documented, however, that there is a gap between designer intent and consumer response; Consumers do not always realize the intent of designers nor draw on the same visual references when perceiving a product, which can reduce their processing fluency of new products. Visual references differ from one consumer to the other which make them difficult to study. In this paper, we argue for a new way of studying visual references: by analyzing the cognitive process that occurs when consumers view a new product and recognize aspects of that product that are similar to visual references in their memory. We present a framework of three approaches for recognizing this similarity and implications for design practice.

In parallel with the industry 4.0 revolution, customers’ demand and number of product requirements are increasing, inducing increased product variability. System complexity is growing with the new technologies and system architectures. Hence, maintaining a system consistent and in the desired state becomes crucial. This paper tackles two problems: a product's variability and its temporal evolution. Regarding variability, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods and Product Line Engineering (PLE) techniques become essential to configuring products by selecting and arranging features in a combination. In parallel, versioning and temporal evolution are managed with the configuration management (CM) principles. A versioned feature model (FM) is proposed. In PLE methodology, the first step is to model variability through traditional FM. This research presents an extension of the FM by integrating CM into it. The versioned FM includes not only features’ variants but also their versions, making it evolve in time. This work is presented as a base for a work that will study the application of CM for PLE. This study is done in an automotive industry context at Renault Group, and the model proposed is applied to Renault's systems.

The as-built geometry and material properties of parts manufactured using Additive Manufacturing (AM) can differ significantly from the as-designed model and base material properties. These differences can be more pronounced in thin strut-like features (e.g., in a lattice structure), making it essential to incorporate them when designing for AM and predicting their structural behaviour. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a numerical model with realistic characteristics based on a thin strut-based test artefact and to use it accurately for estimating its compressive strength. Experiments on test samples produced by selective laser sintering in PA 1101, are used to calculate geometrical deviations, Young's modulus, and yield strength, which are used to calibrate the numerical model. The experimental and numerical results show that the numerical model incorporating geometrical and material deviations can accurately predict the peak load and the force-displacement behaviour. The main contributions of this paper include the design of the test artefact, the average geometrical deviation of the struts, the measured material data, and the developed numerical model.