Many activities in the new product development requires the decision making to find the final solution from multiple alternatives and make an evaluation. Even methods to support decision maker are available, the decision can go to the wrong direction because of heuristics. “Decoy effect” is a heuristic that appears in a comparison when 2 of 3 alternatives are similar but different in quality. The alternative that is similar but better in quality is possibly selected. The paper aims to understand the decoy effect by investigating it in the pairwise comparison that is a powerful technique for comparing alternatives. In an experiment, 3 ideas for the next generation of apple peeler are compared in pairs with different sequences. An impact of the decoy alternative on the comparison between other two alternatives, is investigated. Results show low impact of the decoy effect in the pairwise comparison, but this effect induces a high chance of selecting the decoy alternative when comparing the results from this study and the previous study by proposing 3 alternatives in the same sequence. Applying pairwise comparison to avoid decoy effect is thus an idea that will be further investigated.

In recent years design has had a renaissance in business and management research and practice. Several authors have discussed if management is a design practice and how far design ought to go to design behaviors. This article discusses, evaluates and explores organizational design as a human-centered design practice. Relevant theoretical concepts of organizational theory, design approaches and practices are discussed to evaluate gaps in management practices and potential opportunities for design practice. The study collected and analyzed data from two organizations. The researched revealed several propositions, which provide insights of the usefulness, appropriateness and value of a human-centered design practice to organizational design.

The more dynamic and unpredictable the development constraints, the more agile the development project should be to cope with and utilize inherent change. Especially in such contexts, aligning with the project's mission and vision, committing to next steps, and documenting the development path is challenging. To support the decision making process of self-organized agile development teams with an overview, a recent research paper proposes the Progress Map. The investigation at hand applies the Progress Map in semi-industrial development projects to empirically validate its applicability and performance in the form of a multi-case study. The results indicate that, given future refinements, this instrument can be valuable to plan, document, and communicate the progress of an agile development project.

In recent years, product complexity in terms of function and structure has been driven by technological development in complementary components. Designing unbiased product evaluation metrics being to grasp the complex relationships of product features, and able to capitalize on market needs has become a challenge in industrial practice.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework in which evaluation models are generated by integrating Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM), Hierarchical Clustering and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Whereas ISM constructs hierarchical digraphs (skeletons), Hierarchical Clustering reduces dimensionality of pairwise comparisons (correlations) of design variables, and suggests possible evaluation configurations, and DEA computes weights to provide optimal evaluation metrics. Our computational experiments using more than twenty thousand vehicles from 1982 to 2013 confirmed the feasibility and usefulness of DEA with hierarchical concepts to generate the optimal vehicle evaluation metric, and to suggest configurations for vehicle design layouts.

The aim of the paper is to foster a discussion in the engineering design community about its understanding of the innovation phenomena and the unique contribution that comes from engineering design. The paper reports on the dialouge originating from a series of workshops with participants from different backgrounds in engineering design, systems engineering, industrial design psychology and business.

Definitions of innovation are revisited as used in business, management and engineering design contexts. The role of innovation is then discussed related to product development from (i) the management perspective, (ii) a systems architecture perspective and (iii) in relation to sustainable development as one driver of innovation.

It is argued that engineering design has a central role in how to realise the novelty aspect of innovation and often plays a critical role in maturing these into the valuable products, and there is a need to articulate the role of engineering design in innovation to better resonate with the business and management research.

The Pugh Method of Controlled Convergence is evaluated based on social choice theory, both from an axiomatic basis, and by examining all possible cases of attribute ranks for a range of numbers of alternatives and numbers of attributes. The evaluation shows that, for a typical Pugh application, concept selection varies with the arbitrary choice of datum or is simply incorrect in about one-third of the cases. While there are merits to the iteration steps and creation of new alternatives within the Pugh method, a simpler and more expressive concept ranking procedure can give far superior results.

In this paper on designing organizational processes, we combine insight on reflection-in-action with the role of reflection and experimenting from the organizational routine dynamics literature. Illustrated through a case at a strategy consultancy, we show how a prototyped workshop can elicit reflection-in- action when designing organizational processes. The artifacts used in the prototyped workshop made previous implicit assumptions about the work more explicit. This led to on the spot reflection-in-action of how to improve the prototype. This shows how collective reflection-action can be created by creating a space for reflection, that simultaneously allows for experimentation. Future research between design science and organizational science would thus be fruitful when studying the role of collective reflection- in-action when prototyping organizational processes.

Twenty-three years ago, Sheard published a very well-known description of Systems Engineering roles. Each role represents and defines activities and tasks to be taken into account for performing Systems Engineering through the entire system life cycle. As today's more and more complex systems require different considerations and approaches, these activities and tasks have changed and thereby the description of the role model need to be updated. This work introduces the “Role Model for Systems Engineering Application”, which is adapted to today's circumstances, with the intention to give practitioners guidance in applying Systems Engineering. For this purpose, results from literature as well as from research projects and industrial applications experience were analyzed and combined to an updated role description.

This work falls within the empirical studies of design activity. Its project is to understand Le Corbusier's designing way and how does he work and structure his design processes. Doing so, it jumps above the descriptive and doctrinal knowledge of objects produced by “Le Corbusier” to study the actions and mechanisms that led to them.

To achieve its aim, this study uses genetic method, developed by P.M. De Biasi of literary origin, this research method is made of three stages. The first one, which is of empirical nature, is one of data gathering. It leads to the establishment of genesis tables and to the classification of the all collected documents. The second stage, makes the analysis of all the collected documents one by one. It allows the restitution of the creative process of one projects “Le Corbusier” which is “la chapelle de Notre Dame du haut de Ronchamp”. The last stage is finally that define the design processe of the this project. The results show that the design activity of “Le Corbuiser” obeys the overall logic of one generic model which may be called his individual designing style.

Design pervades our world in variety and complexity that is difficult to grasp. Different disciplines and researchers take one or few perspectives to study, model, and try to understand design, why it fails and when it succeeds. However, without a comprehensive model, the value of such approaches is limited. We created a framework – the PSI (Problem, Social and Institutional Spaces) framework – that includes several models, ranging from simple to complex, networked, and hierarchical or recursive that can be used to model all design scenarios. In what follows, we demonstrate the network version of this framework, how it is used, and what insight it can present. The diversity of situations we present, mergers and acquisitions of companies, collaborations between industry and university, large multi- organizational projects, and a very complex project, as well as other cases we do not present here, confers the validity of utility and potential of the PSI framework.

This study is an exploratory analysis of enabling technologies’ influence on the trajectory of industry development using a co-evolutionary model of technology development. When combined, enabling technologies can create new technology-market industry cycles, resulting in transformative innovation. The research approach of this empirical study is to use both primary and secondary data to create a history of the robotics industry and to explore the pre and post changes in the industry from the inclusion of enabling technologies over multiple generations. We propose a new model for understanding the theoretical and practical study of technology development through the lens of enabling technologies and their development and maturity cycles.

Much of the work in design research focusses on the development of methods and tools to support engineering designers. Many of these tools are nowadays implemented in software. Due to the strongly growing use of computers and smart devices in the last two decades, the expectations of users increased dramatically. In particular users expect good usability, for example little effort for learning to apply the software. Therefore, the usability evaluation of design software tools is crucial. A software tool with bad usability will not be used in industrial practice. Recommendations for usability evaluation of software often stem from the field of Human Computer Interaction. The aim of this paper is to tailor these general approaches to the specific needs of engineering design. In addition, we propose a method to analyse the results of the evaluation and to derive suggestions for improving the design software tool. We apply the usability evaluation method on a use case - the KoMBi software tool for bio-inspired design. The case study provides additional insights with regards to problem, causes and improvement categories.

Prototypes are a common feature of many product design and development endeavours. An ever widening range of prototyping options are available to designers and engineers. May particular options be superior to others, or more appropriate for particular endeavours? This paper reviews current literature on the nature of what constitutes a prototype and the benefits they offer to the discipline. They principally facilitate communication, aid learning, help gain and provide feedback, inform decision making and generally provide superior design outcomes. In order to determine if any particular manner of prototype is preferable for achieving these benefits a comparative study of some of the contemporary prototyping methods is subsequently conducted: A 3D printed prototype (physical prototype), a CAD prototype (represented using a computer monitor), an augmented reality prototype (represented using a tablet device) and a virtual reality prototype (represented using a stereo projector and polarised glasses). The results indicate that while all provide benefits, overall the physical prototype performs best and the augmented reality prototype performs most poorly.

Academics teach engineering design based on design theory and best practices, practitioners teach design based on their experience. Is there a difference between them? There appears to be little prior work in comparing the design processes of design academics and practitioners. This paper presents a case study in which the design activity of a team of academics was compared to that of a team of practitioners. The participants’ verbalizations during team discussions were coded using the Function- Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology. A qualitative comparison reveals that the team of practitioners constructs the design space earlier and generally spends more time in the solution space than the team of academics. Further, the team of practitioners has a significant number of direct transitions from function (F) to structure (S), while no such transitions are observed for the team of academics. Given that this is a single case study, the results cannot be used as the basis for any generalizations on how academics and practitioners compare. This is a successful proof of methodologies that lay the foundation for a series of hypotheses to be tested in a future study.

Breakthrough technologies introduce a radically new capability or a drastic performance improvement. However, the existing engineering design literature does not specifically pay attention to them. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for breakthrough technologies, aiming for a more detailed characterization of breakthrough technologies. First, based on a literature survey, we reflect on the relationship between breakthrough technology and innovation. In addition, we explore the relationship between breakthrough technologies at the component and system level. Next, we propose a conceptual framework with dimensions in which breakthroughs may occur and the corresponding expansion of concepts and knowledge, drawing from C-K theory. We subsequently apply the framework to the case of a laser sail-propelled interstellar probe. We conclude that the relationship between component and system-level breakthrough technologies requires further exploration. Furthermore, the coupling between the breakthrough technology and market breakthrough in the form of a new business model seems interesting for future work.

Aero-engine component design decisions should consider re-manufacturing and/or repair strategies and their impact on lifecycle cost. Existing design approaches do not account for alternative production technologies such as the use of additive manufacturing in life extension processes. This paper presents a modeling and optimization methodology for examining the impact of design decisions in the early development stage on component lifecycle cost during the in-service phase while considering the potential use of additive manufacturing in life extension strategies. Specifically, a system dynamics model is developed to assess different end-of-life scenarios. Finally, an optimization problem is formulated and solved to minimize lifecycle cost with respect to design variables related to re-manufacturing.

Maier and Fadel pioneered Affordance-Based Design (ABD) based on Gibson's revolutionary theory of affordances and Norman's deployment of the concept in his book, “The Design of Everyday Things”. Gibson (1979) introduced the affordance concept into the discipline of Ecological Psychology to address the interactions between an object and an agent. The Ecological approach includes the direct perception of affordances for the user along with a consideration of the users’ biomechanics. However, as the concept of affordance was imported and utilized in different disciplines, including engineering design, some important aspects of Ecological theory were omitted.

This paper is an attempt to review the definitions and different utilizations of the affordance concept focusing on the design of usable products to identify the different views and the missing elements. After addressing the divergent viewpoints of affordances, we provide recommendations to improve the usability aspects in ABD by considering direct perception and ergonomics. We claim that a design (based on affordances) that fails to address both criteria may result in a product that is less usable.

This contribution presents a systematic for the elicitation of objectives and the utilization of objectives to identify reference products. The systematic is based on existing meta models. The model of objectives as proposed in this research eases decision-making and outlines the next validation activities. A key success factor is the project transferability between teams, which is often necessary in predevelopment. This is ensured through comprehensibility of objectives which benefits from the linkage between the model of objectives and the knowledge base. The proposed systematic is applied to a predevelopment project which is used as case study. In the case study it has been shown that objectives can be used to identify reference products. The approach is validated in a live-lab setting with seven engineering teams with six graduate students, two engineers of an industrial partner and a research associate. Several workshops were used to train all members of the teams in the systematic. The effects of the systematic are assessed in dedicated interviews, a survey as well as with observation of the engineering teams during milestones and engineering activities between milestones.

Design research faces a critical 'impact gap' where the potential for scientific and practical impact is yet to be fully realised. A key means of bridging this gap is the adoption of fundamental theory from other fields to support clarification and synergy in design research. In this paper we examine one of the main candidates for adoption: dual-process theory of cognition. Cognition forms a common element across much of the design literature and leads to fundamental dual-process theories of reasoning. While dual- process theory has started to be recognised in design research, its widespread recognition and potential utility have not been widely explored. Following a conceptual theory development approach we identify and logically describe interactions between dual-process theory and design research. We conclude the paper with a proposition of a design research framework with a core rooted in dual-process theory, and based on this, an agenda for theory-driven design research. This contributes to the debate on how to improve impact, and theoretical and scientific rigour in design research, and provides a concrete agenda for discussion and development within the community.

This paper presents the findings of a preliminary study comparing implementation of design changes using various computer-aided design (CAD) working styles. Our study compares individuals’ and pairs’ completion of a series of changes to a toy car CAD model. We discuss the results in terms of productivity and value added ratio, derived from time-based quantitative data. We also discuss qualitative findings acquired through post-study surveys. Overall, our findings suggest that pairs were less efficient than individual designers due to overheads like communication, history dependency and complex couplings within the CAD model tree. However, it is also noteworthy that within each pair the lead participant's performance was at par with individual participants. Lastly, we also discuss behaviors and patterns that emerge as unique to the synchronous collaborative environment, motivating future work.