This paper explores the concept of 'playables,' defined as tangible objects intentionally designed for immersive play, distinct from traditional utilitarian objects. It delves into how playables, unlike everyday items, transcend functionality, fostering creativity and curiosity in immersive play. It explores how playables differ from acknowledged design principles, drawing upon Dieter Rams and Don Norman. By recognizing the need for distinct design perspectives for playables, the paper contributes to unlocking their potential to enable wonder in immersive play experiences.

Robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in the workplace. As Industry 5.0 pursues human-centric technologies, a greater understanding of what effects aesthetics has on those interacting with robots is needed. This paper sets out robot morphology as a way to characterise key form types, and proposes seven classifications: anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, phytomorphism, artemorphism, functiomorphism, amorphism, and neomorphism. Through an assessment of the current robot aesthetic landscape, design dimensions are identified with examples that can inform future robot design.

Large organisations are designing complex technology-based tools for their staff to use. In busy workplace environments, it can be difficult to get user input about a design. This paper describes the designer and user interactions in one such organisation, gaining insights that could be useful in other similar settings. The findings are based on a set of interviews with designers and researchers within the organisation. The paper identifies the current practices and constraints involved in understanding and capturing users' needs and discusses potential solutions.

The concept of volumetric spaces has evolved in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector, ranging from traditional onsite built spaces to modern modular houses and portable architecture. Despite this diversity, there lacks a comprehensive framework to analyze volumetric space products across dimensions. This paper presents a conceptual framework based on abductive reasoning and qualitative analysis, aiming to explore interdependencies among dimensions. It hypothesizes that volumetric space dimensions are perceived differently and demonstrate interdependencies.

Over years of practice, industrial designers have developed three steps that always lead to a design solution: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Usually, the result is a product, but sometimes it is a demonstrator, a versatile concept, combining design, engineering, and art. However, designers usually are not aware of this notion. But if the result is different, how does it affect the design process? The analysis of the contextual inquiry study of two demonstrators shows that the transformation should happen during the ideation phase, where abstract concept becomes a story.

Inertial motion capture has garnered considerable attention within the manufacturing industry for ergonomic assessments due to high reliability and fewer constraints compared to alternative posture tracking direct measurement tools. However, these wearable systems, while ensuring reliability and precision in the results, also introduce a degree of invasiveness. Hence, user experience becomes an important aspect for design and development of such systems. This paper reveals major user experience issues resulting from an experimental study for promoting user-centred design of wearable systems.

Designing an equally usable and emotionally appealing product remains a challenge for product developers, not least due to conflicting goals. Product developers need to constantly map the affective user requirements to the product, whereby the requirements for the emotional and usable product design often cannot be equally addressed. The systematic approach presented can help product developers in conflicting decision-making situations to represent these affective user requirements by selecting and prioritising context-relevant influencing factors using multi-criteria decision-making methods.

The UK construction industry is an important aspect of the UK economy; however, it is struggling to keep pace with wider economic growth and if it does not change it will not be able to keep up with demand. There is a gap between academia and practice, and little understanding of how to successfully innovate within the industry. Following a workshop with 25 construction industry professionals on the barriers to innovation in the construction industry, key themes were developed through thematic analysis including regulation, fragmentation and constant change.

Innovation-driven firms must adopt an open design strategy for competitiveness. Co-design games are recommended to foster an open, equal, and collaborative culture. However, most studies focus on the West. East-Asian countries, notably China, face unique challenges due to cultural disparities and inertia. This paper explores design games in the Chinese context through a case study with traditional workshops, revealing participants' perspectives and the potential impact on cultural inertia.

We have a unique opportunity to consider justice in our design of a cleaner energy system. This paper introduces the Justice-Embedded Requirements Engineering (JERE) process, which was created to enable engineers to consider project goals, requirements, and potential project impacts on historically marginalized, climate-vulnerable communities. Given JERE's focus on energy technologies, we demonstrate the process using a concentrating solar power example. JERE provides engineers with a tool to better ensure justice is embedded in the system design process from the beginning.

From an economic perspective, the appeal of a product diminishes over time. However, volatile markets and divergent technological advancements make it challenging to anticipate when and to what extent changes will be necessary. Therefore, it is important to be able to integrate changes after a product's launch. This paper provides an overview of different perspectives on the product lifecycle. In addition, the paper presents an empirical study on implementing changes at an automobile manufacturer.

Due to the rising multidisciplinarity and connectivity of products especially modular product families, a sophisticated handling of the information is crucial for reducing complexity during the development. System modelling techniques have evolved to assist engineers with managing information. However, nowadays, it is rarely focusing on modular product families. This paper introduces a meta-model based on an ontology, which improves the creation and management of modular product family and its occurring data. The meta-model is presented using the example of a Passenger Service Unit (PSU).

To handle the increased complexity within the automotive industry, this paper introduces a guideline, which aims to support development service providers to examine the introduction and if applicable support the introduction of systems engineering. The initial verification was performed through applying the guideline at Porsche Engineering as an exemplary service provider. As a result, the success factors "knowledge basis" and "knowledge transfer" have been improved by two points on a 1-5 Likert-scale by introducing a SE process-specific knowledge platform and a defined knowledge transfer.

The evolving needs of customers and stakeholders necessitate the collaboration of diverse system elements within a cyber-physical, socio-technical network. Socio-technical systems are characterized by numerous complex interdependencies as well as by endogenous and exogenous influences. A key issue that developers must address is the mitigation of data and information uncertainties. The authors introduce an approach that operationalizes Design Thinking as a supporting sufficient condition within the context of designing system models in the realm of Model-Based Systems Engineering.

System models are used to merge relevant engineering artefacts and relationships. Therefore, a high model quality must be ensured. Currently, there is no method for defining company-specific metrics to assess system model quality. In a six-step research approach, a method is defined: (1) literature analysis on quality assessment approaches, (2) derivation of success factors, (3) evaluation of approaches, (4) development of a method, (5) application in automotive industry, and (6) evaluation. The method supports system engineers to derive tailored metrics to objectively assess the model quality.

Collaborative robots (cobots) allow for flexible manufacturing, supporting more customised product designs. Although safety is key for socio-technical human-cobot workplaces, existing safety assessment support like standards and guidelines require extensive experience and can be experienced as overwhelming. To make cobot risk assessments more accessible, especially for novices, and increase traceability from hazard to risk to mitigation, this paper presents a matrix-based approach that decomposes this daunting activity into smaller better manageable steps.

In the context of system of systems (SoS) engineering, the incorporation of design principles is critical to guide the engineering process. This paper presents a systematic literature review to synthesize a list of principles tailored for SoS. 26 principles were identified as generic principles and 39 were mapped to the specific challenges in SoS engineering. Through an evaluation using the principle of modularisation in the design of a charging infrastructure, the study offers insights into the real-world effectiveness of these principles, showing their relevance in SoS engineering tasks.

The ongoing development of technology and AI facilitates the emergence of service robots in various application fields. Hence, the development of robot-infrastructure product-service systems (PSS) will become increasingly important. Based on the existing literature we propose a new methodological approach for a joint development of robot and infrastructure in the context of a socio-technical system with various stakeholders. We suggest digital models and physical prototypes to synchronize service and product development. The applicability is demonstrated for autonomous waste management robots.

A core predicate of Industry 5.0 (I5.0) is the integration of human, environmental and social factors with new technologies. The integration of collaborative robots offers increased productivity but raises questions on safety and how robots can respond to varying cognitive and physical attributes. This paper discusses the significance of structured ontologies in managing complex information for proactive, safe, and productive human-robot collaboration. The paper highlights the future work to be undertaken to ensure the safe and fluid integration of humans and robots within I5.0.

The environment for powertrain production system engineers is changing radically. This initial prescriptive study proposes a systems engineering framework based on two previous case studies which are under review for publication concerning design of battery plants. The framework was developed based on ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 standard using Concept of Operations and Model-Based Systems Engineering in a workshop setting, with a focus on visualisation to understand the practical and emotional needs of the humans in the system. The framework was validated by twelve senior project members.