Designing vibrating systems is challenging due to component interaction. One approach to reduce the resulting complexity is top-down design where requirements on components are formulated such that the overall system achieves the design goal. Previous work showed how to derive quantitative and solution-neutral requirements on components of a vibrating system, expressed as permissible ranges of impedance. This work adapts the methodology to a practical use case and provides a concrete technical solution: A hammer drill that can cause white finger syndromes to users is equipped with an appropriate vibration absorber. The hammer drill is represented by a lumped mass model and validated using experimental data of a reference design. Solution-neutral and quantitative component requirements on the overall dynamics of the vibration absorber expressed by impedance are derived. They provide a clear target for the component design. A vibration absorber in form of a Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) is designed accordingly. The final design is validated experimentally and shown to reduce the vibration by 47%.

The International Design Engineering Annual (IDEA) Challenge is a virtually hosted hackathon for Engineering Design researchers with aims of: i) generating open access datasets; ii) fostering community between researchers; and, iii) applying great design minds to develop solutions to real design problems. This paper presents the 2022 IDEA challenge and elements of the captured dataset with the aim of providing insights into prototyping behaviours at virtually hosted hackathons, comparing it with the 2021 challenge dataset and providing reflections and learnings from two years of running the challenge. The dataset is shown to provide valuable insights into how designers spend their time at hackathon events and how, why and when prototypes are used during their design processes. The dataset also corroborates the findings from the 2021 dataset, demonstrating the complementarity of physical and sketch prototypes. With this paper, we also invite the wider community to contribute to the IDEA Challenge in future years, either as participants or in using the platform to run their own design studies.

Product development stages are typically characterized by different forms of representations and degrees of specification, which potentially affect user's perception and evaluation. These effects are worth investigating more closely also because of the growing relevance of new technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) in the design field. The objective of this paper is to elucidate the mutual relations between forms of representation, visual behaviour, and people's evaluations. The focus is on differences between virtual and physical prototypes. In the illustrated experiment, participants visited a tiny house in an immersive VR (360° images acquisition). The results were compared with a past experiment where the physical prototype of the same product was similarly evaluated. The dwell times on Areas of Interest (AOIs) pertaining to the tiny house were compared and correlated to variables concerning subjective evaluations. The results show just a few similarities of visual exploration in terms of gazed AOIs. Substantial differences in terms of how the duration of gazing affects evaluations have been found too. The larger number of significant correlations between observations and evaluations in the virtual exploration emerged.

We investigate reverging - the phase between the diverging and converging steps in a creative process - in the context of a visual thinking agency. Creative facilitation literature advocates for such a phase, aimed at revisiting and rearranging ideas generated during diverging, to prepare for converging. However, in practice this step is often neglected or not performed well, resulting into a sense of increased complexity or lack of client ownership.

Two studies were used to investigate reverging in context: a preliminary study consisted of interviews and observations to better understand reverging in current visual thinking practices. The follow-up study focused on co-creating a tool to solve the problem identified in the preliminary study.

While the preliminary study revealed the need to involve clients in both diverging and reverging phases, the follow-up study resulted in the creation of the Whiteboard Canvas. The tool was tested in practice and several benefits of reverging in visual thinking practices emerged.

The tool empowers visual thinking practitioners to involve their clients more actively in reverging, resulting into a more deliberate creative process and an increased sense of client ownership.

Considering the prevalence of digital interaction within the Generation Alpha, this study focuses on the digital wellbeing of elementary school-aged children in South Korea. By taking into account the multi-faceted nature, this study frames the issue that exists within children's digital wellbeing as a complex problem and aims to have a better comprehensive understanding of the system using a designerly and systems thinking approach. Thus, this study conducts a Systematic literature review and thematic analysis to get grasp of the current situation which then is translated using a systems thinking-based visualization tool to convey the causal relationships that exist within the system. Therefore, the outcome of this study presents a concept map that consolidates the findings to communicate a holistic perspective of children's digital wellbeing which can be used in design activities and decision-making processes which contribute to future design solutions and conversations.

Computational design tools allow the generation of vast numbers of possible designs, entrusting the human designer with describing constraints or specifications to guide exploration of the design space. Designers can have many different decision considerations when conducting this type of exploration, including form, function, users, or context. In this work, we investigate strategies that emerge when people are tasked with exploring a large design space within either a non-immersive (2D) or immersive (VR) interface and equipped with action-based interactions to set or envision specifications related to their considerations. Results from a 28 participant user study uncovers that people have varying strategies to enact their decision considerations that are not unique to the type of interface. However, the interfaces differ in perceptions of enabling breadth or depth of exploration holistically, with preference towards 2D interfaces to compare options, and VR to understand single designs. These results have implications for the user experience of systems that allow designers to explore the outputs of large design spaces, both at the interaction and interface levels.

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 health sector in the humanitarian context is currently experiencing great pressure in delivering adequate care, due to a number of increasing emerging diseases. The World Health Organization (2022) reports that: '…since 2011, there have been more than 1200 outbreaks of epidemic-prone diseases in 188 countries around the world, causing widespread death and suffering…’. A key factor that can contribute to ensure high quality care is the possibility to rely on adequate infrastructure and products. This paper presents the interdisciplinary methodology deployed to design and develop an innovative infectious diseases treatment module that could be deployed and utilised in the very first phases of health emergencies. The methodology proposed is organised around a three-level approach to ensure both core disciplinary solidity, and holistic understanding of the complexity of the challenge. The contribution of this work is the definition of key aspects in the proposed methodology that can help overcome difficulties in delivering high quality interdisciplinary research and work, as well as highlighting behavioural patterns that can ensure successful delivery of innovative products and facilities for the humanitarian health sector.

Digital media are a means to deliver products and services, but also a channel to interact with consumers and a source of information on users’ preferences. Data shared by customers on the web, the User-Generated Content (UGC), can give entrepreneurs a detailed perspective of the market. This work examines an application of Natural Language Processing techniques on UGC to discover insights on users' opinions. We collected more than 13.000 reviews of software from digital stores and review website to gather information on the customers’ perspective and their response to a given marketing strategy in two case studies on digital product's launch. The objective is to give support to two Italian companies in the process of business model development through data-driven evidence. We aim to discover who are the users and which are their needs using a lexicon-based approach to mine unstructured text. The results provide qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the market segments. We propose a method to examine UGC and to explore customers’ behavior on social media. The findings helped managers for the development of their business model, enhancing an informed decision-making process.

Collaborative robots (“cobots”) have attracted growing attention in academia and industry over the last years. Due to in-built safety features and easy programming, they allow for close human-cobot collaboration and support e.g. flexible manufacturing. However, the lack of a common understanding what a cobot is along with its traditional focus on arm-based cobots complicates further research and industry adoption. Thus, this paper analyses the variety of definitions in literature incl. standards and practice examples to derive a consistent and holistic definition and taxonomy of what a collaborative robot is. Aside from contributing a structured overview of various forms of human-robot collaboration, this builds an important foundation for future research as it systematically differentiates different cobot types. Companies and other organisations will benefit by a better understanding of what type of cobot they need and how to ensure safe collaboration.

Model-Based Definition provides several benefits for communicating between engineering and other downstream stakeholders. Particularly, semantic PMI information included in 3D models benefits both CAM programming and inspection phases. However, the efficiency of generating CAM- and CAI codes automatically according to the semantic PMI information varies due to the compatibility of different systems. This paper focuses on the experiment that we made on inspecting three different parts with the Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM). We compared four different programming methods and found that the efficiency of inspecting depends on the serial size of the parts. The completely automatic CAI-programming method does not necessarily produce the most effective CAI code compared to the competent human programmer. This is notable, especially in large series due to achieved cumulative time savings in the inspection of each part. With small series, fully automatic PMI method and human-assisted automatic PMIfp method provide significant benefits in the inspection process due to time savings in CAI-programming work.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a unique manufacturing technology that is being rapidly accepted in various industries, leading to increased demand for experts who know to work with AM and how to design AM products. This led to a broader adaptation of AM in an educational context with various research on how to teach AM. However, most approaches are focused on teaching advanced AM application and Design for AM (DfAM), including both restrictive and opportunistic approaches, with little attention to specialised educational tools to show and teach the basic principle, possibilities and characteristics of AM. This paper presents the development of an Educational Kit for AM to address the gap and help teachers to explain the basics of AM, with a current focus on the material extrusion process. The Educational Kit is made of 17 models and accompanied cards explaining the essential characteristics of AM through short textual explanations, graphics, examples and manufacturing data. The Educational Kit for AM is intended to be used in introductory lessons on AM, so the novices in AM can quickly grasp the characteristics of AM and the basic terms used in AM before advancing to other AM and DfAM topics.

One of the obstacles to the ability of research to make an impact on industry resides on the research process itself. Today, there is a need to accelerate the means for research to support industrial transformation. At the same time, there is the need to maintain scientific rigorousness, which often requires time. To solve this trade-off, this paper evaluates existing research approaches through the lenses of agile development. The analysis is based on a simulation of research process architectures, and on observations made over several research projects with industry. The results of this analysis highlight five light-but-sufficient rules of research project behavior to keep momentum, motivation and trust when doing research with industry. The paper demonstrates the use of these five rules in a “research sprint” conducted iwith two automotive OEMs.

This paper aims to identify the reasons for neglecting and the motivations for using management tools among three groups of students participating in a project that was carried out and followed over a period of one semester. For this purpose, a survey in the form of questionnaires and interviews was created. Particular emphasis was placed on the use of project management methods, tools and techniques and respondents were asked to rate the effectiveness of their usage. Additionally, the participants were asked to report limitations or distractions they had encountered. The results revealed five aspects that mainly influenced the students’ motivation in using management tools: the team atmosphere, determining responsibilities, performance transparency, expectations by the supervisors, feedback and performance evaluation. On that basis conclusions were drawn on what actions can be taken to motivate future students and designers.

The circular economy (CE) aims at the cycling of resources through restorative and regenerative strategies. To achieve circularity, coordination of several actors is necessary. The interaction among actors allows the connection between the CE and ecosystem research fields. Although fundamental, the relationships, mainly cooperation, among actors within an ecosystem to foster circularity is not deeply explored in the literature. The objective of this study was to identify the possibilities of cooperation within circular ecosystems, in particular, the motivations that make the actors interact to achieve a CE. A systematic literature review (SLR) and a case study of a Brazilian ecosystem specialized in the recycling of carton packages to manufacture ecological tiles were conducted. The goal was to identify the motivations through the SLR and the case study so the theoretical and the empirical results could be compared. As a result, 28 motivations for actors to engage in ecosystems driven by circularity were identified. In order to achieve a complete and circular solution, actors must be able to clearly understand their roles and relationships so that they can establish new partnerships or reframe those already established.