Modern products are often developed in local distributed teams involving various engineering domains. As a result, product development processes are characterized by a high degree of complexity and individuality. However, the project context is often not integrated into the project planning, which can lead to uncertainties in the processes. In addition, reflection does not take place adequately in process execution. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for agile process design that enables reducing uncertainties based on context-specific reflections and adapting the processes.

A central part of the design process is collaboration, harnessing specialist expertise often in meetings. We understand relatively little about how meetings serve teams of designers and their work and this study uses soft systems methodology to attempt to create structures that describe and explain meetings. The results suggest extension of the boundary of interest and suggest a conceptual framework which reveals some under-addressed stages and activities which may help designers improve their meetings.

There is little tolerance for deviation in time, budget and quality in the execution of product development projects. On the other hand, the project environment is gaining complexity. Changes on project scope are daily business. We set up an initial hypothesis, that unplanned changes -newness- has negative impact on projects. We developed and executed therefore a survey about factors belonging to innovation, complexity and newness to test their perceived impact on project success. Our data show a positive correlation between unsuccessful projects and newness, which is discussed in the paper.

Flexibility and changeability are crucial when it comes to the design of embedded automotive architectures. However, flexibility and changeability are concepts rooted in the overall product and its objectives, while architectural design decisions may affect local subsystems as well as the overall system. Axiomatic design is applied to bridge this gap: The architecture is decomposed into its entities and changeability is described through the design's information content. Five domains of actions to foster changeability are identified and generic action schemes are derived.

This paper contributes to the reduction of conflicts arising along the construction process by improving contract management tools and contracts designing tools. We analyse the existing system of representation of relations between Owner and Contractor, the contract and the construction processes. We improve the actual representation of construction processes by creating a link with the contract. Our ambition is to create a representation that will allow organizations and project managers to represent the construction contracts and design better construction contracts.

The advantages of distributed development teams help companies to address megatrends like globalization and individualization. However, development teams are facing challenges according to increasing requirements on communication processes. This approach provides a methodology to identify and address improvement potentials in communication processes of distributed product development by including the dimensions technology, organization and human involved in the development process. The validation of the methodology's process steps was carried out together with a machine tool manufacturer.

Crucial in the design process, Technology Readiness Levels are a common form of technology maturity assessment. Studies suggest that the TRL scale can be subjective and biased. Automating the assessment can reduce human bias. This paper highlights important challenges of automation by presenting data collected on 15 technologies from the nanotechnology sector. Our findings show that, contrary to claims from the literature, patent data exists for low maturity technologies and may be useful for automation. We also found that there exists unexpected trends in data publications at TRL 2, 3 and 4.

In automotive industry, the design process is costly and time-consuming. Car safety is a crucial factor in the development of a vehicle, which is why crash simulation is an essential step in the design process. To improve car crash simulation analysis, it is necessary to reduce the time required and support the resolution of encountered design issues. We propose a knowledge management approach to support car crash simulation analysis and ensure the collaboration of different stakeholders. In a knowledge-intensive context, we used an ontology-based approach to formalise and capture knowledge.

As time-to-market is getting shorter, customer needs have to be identified as early as possible in product development. Correctly applied, corporate foresight can give a glimpse into the future to anticipate such needs and thus gain a competitive advantage. A support tool to choose the appropriate method of foresight is not available yet. Thus, a literature study on foresight methods in industry is performed and a novel decision support tool is proposed which avoids high entrepreneurial risks. Based on the findings, potentials for future work are identified for different types of methods.

More than 15 years after the publication of the agile manifesto of software development, agile development approaches have also reached the processes of physical product development. Because of the boundary conditions and requirements here, which differ strongly from those of pure software development, these approaches often reach their limits. However, research and practice have quickly recognized that hybrid approaches integrate the strengths of agile and plan-driven development. This paper presents 25 hybrid development approaches that have been identified in a Systematic Literature Review.

One challenge within idea management of the front end of the design process is the handling of radical ideas, meaning ideas with a high degree of novelty. Companies are approaching radical and incremental ideas frequently with the same methods, although many reasoned claims exists for treating ideas differently according to the degree of novelty. The paper aims to address the fact that ambidexterity does not play any specific role in the front end. Therefore, a framework of an extended idea process model based on the idea of ambidexterity is shown and initial test results are presented.

Reflection is understood as an integral part of designing and design processes. Despite the high relevance and an ongoing discussion about agile engineering, we found that reflection is rarley established in industrial practice. There is a need for an approach structuring the wide range of levels, stakeholders, objects and timing of reflections. The introduced RECAP framework is an important step towards a guideline (heuristic) for reflection in engineering projects. Based on the four dimensions objectives, stakeholders, objects, and processes it supports structured planning of reflection.

In the digital era, products’ forms do not necessarily follow their function. Design fixation may happen when a designer attempts to generate diverse concepts. New design heuristics for digital design were extracted to support designers in the early conceptual design stage. Ten design heuristics were extracted from 998 RedDot award-winning concept designs (2013-2017) through a five-step process. It was preliminarily tested by four practitioners and proved to have positively influenced their conceptual design.

A new way of structuring and interpretation of multiple domain matrix is proposed as the basis for categorisation of design parameter relations complexity. Depending on the kind and the degree of coupling of the parameters, the developed methodology activates the appropriate coloured Petri net (CPN) models for semi-automatic support of communication between the members of the design team. The proposed extension of MDM combined with CPN is a novel approach to predicting and managing communication patterns necessary during teamwork coordination on critical interfaces between product components.

The paper suggests an innovative design research and intervention approach using a poststructuralist organizational education perspective. The potential of a high impact trans-epistemic design process is shown for the field of industry 4.0 and the specific context of cognitive assistive systems (CASs). The multi-layered approach addresses the design of technical, social and educational complexity to implement CASs sustainably on the shopfloor and exploit their potential in industry 4.0. Finally, we will shed light on how the approach can enhance deep organizational transformation in industry.

This paper proposes an analytical framework for estimating the domain where a type of technology can be used in a system. In order to achieve this aim, we have elaborated on the concepts of technology critical, technology sensitive, and the technology comfort zone, to analytically assess the impact of a new technology in the early phases of system design. The result is a general method to indicate the range of requirements that can result in valid designs. This tool can assist in the decision-making processes for technology portfolio selection based on sustainable principles.

Introducing more customized products causes complexity costs, which are hard to estimate and measure. Researchers and practitioners have therefore developed approaches to measure these costs. This paper reviews the current approaches and reveals a lack of a holistic view on the underlying problem and, hence, deficits to certain economic questions. We therefore suggest using the Extended Axiomatic Design (EAD) framework as an interdisciplinary model that adresses the economic consequences of variety-induced complexity.

This paper reviews the literature on risk management practices and methods in product design and development. Based on an expert workshop by the Risk Management Processes and Methods in Design Special Interest Group within the Design Society and literature review, three key areas are discussed: risk identification, assessment, and mitigation. In each area, researchers have described practices that are used in product development organizations, proposed new methods to support risk management processes and decision-making, and generated evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of these activities.

Many companies face a challenge while defining their individualized digitalization strategy. Therefore, the interrelation of corporate and digitalization strategy is addressed and a novel procedure model to assist companies in defining their strategy is introduced. Based on their corporate strategy, the introduced model allows companies to simply identify suitable business model patterns, digitization use cases and offers a possibility to asses the maturity level of their internal processes and evaluate the added value from an economic point of view.

When developing new systems, there is always some kind of reference to existing systems. Various approaches aim at describing qualitatively different characteristics of such connections, often depicted as some form of variation. Among other things, this is done with regard to innovation potential and development risk. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which established methods of risk management refer to modelling approaches for variations by means as mentionend above. After a litertaure search 11 methods and method clusters are analyzed more in detail within a method benchmark.