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.

The valorization of plastic wastes in the Circular Economy poses the challenge of developing inter-organizational systems. Concerning the implementation, the inter-organizational level consists of a set of companies from the same segment acting in different roles in the circular system. This research aims to demonstrate a structured method designed to develop a demand-driven inter-organizational closed-loop circular system for the valorization of packaging waste.

The five-step method includes (i) Contextualization/problematization, (ii) Closed-loop system mapping, (iii) Closed-loop system consolidation, (iv) Building Commitment,(v) Pilot system implementation and operation. A real case illustrates the method. As the unit of analysis we have chosen the supply chain and reverse channels of expanded and extruded polystyrene packaging in Brazil. The project was developed from December 2021 to March 2022.

The contribution to the literature is to validate the premises and to provide insight into the challenges of developing real circular economy closed loop systems. The practical contribution is to support the development of a recycling system of packaging in a developing country.

During product development, the customer or internal stakeholders initiate changes concerning the components or functions of a cyber-physical system (CPS). The complexity of such a CPS causes difficulties in evaluating the effects of a component change. Accordingly, product developers need an assistance system to quantify the impact of a component change on hardware, software, system functions, and production processes. Therefore, this paper focuses on concepts to evaluate the effects of component, functional, and process changes and contributes to its clarification and further understanding of the importance and requirements for such an assistance system. The literature review assesses the identified methods regarding their objectives, application objects, level of automation, and relations characteristics. However, the literature review pointed out that the change prediction method from Clarkson et al. (2004) is well-established in the literature and able to quantify the impact of a change.

Companies are increasingly struggling to manage their complex product portfolios. Since they do not fully understand the complexity, intelligent solutions are required. Emerging technologies and tools offer new ways to deal with existing problems. With the help of clustering, similarities between product variants can be identified automatically, and complexity can be systematically reduced. This article aims to develop a methodological approach to identify correlations between product variants in complex product portfolios automatically by using clustering algorithms. The approach includes the systematic cleaning and transformation of product portfolio data. In addition, a guide for algorithm selection and evaluation of clustering results is presented. As the last step, the results are systematically analysed and visualised. To validate the methodical approach, it is applied to a real-world data set of a commercial vehicle manufacturer and the usefulness of the results is confirmed in an expert workshop.

The perceived complexity of a product (product complexity) is doubtless an influential phenomenon in a design project. Insight into this factor and how it can be measured, is key to understanding its influence, supporting project planning and resource demand estimation. Opinions on product complexity vary greatly, with many definitions, scales and techniques to measure product complexity available; many of which draw their conclusions from engineering design research. Yet the field of product (or industrial) design companies, whose designers work across a vast range of product types, from domestic to industrial remains under researched. These designers have a tacit understanding of many influences over their projects, of which product complexity is one.

This paper presents an analysis of the dimensions (or measures) of product complexity found in literature and compares its findings to the measures defined by practicing product designers. This paper will demonstrate the process used to identify these dimensions and the scales developed to assess product complexity in a practical way and will make conclusions on the perspectives held on product complexity by product designers.

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.

As an initial step towards a better understanding of cognitive load in computer-aided design (CAD), the herein presented study investigated cognitive load imposed on 24 mechanical engineers during two CAD modelling tasks of intentionally different complexity levels. The cognitive load has been rarely studied in the CAD context, which resulted in the lack of understanding if and how the EEG-based indicators available from the literature reflect the changes in cognitive load imposed on engineering designers in CAD activities. Therefore, cognitive load was measured and analysed using three EEG-based indicators to explore insights that might be obtained from them. The initial analysis revealed different cognitive load results from the employed indicators for the same EEG data. In addition, the study implies that the cognitive load results obtained through the used indicators are only partially coherent with the CAD modelling task complexity. Hence, the results imply that the chosen EEG-based indicator matters when measuring and analysing cognitive load in CAD modelling tasks and that its adjustment for CAD context might be needed.

The concept of inclusivity involved an understanding of people, programmes and places, embedded with complex issues. 21 student designers took part in a first-of-its-kind five-day codesign programme to develop solutions for inclusive and engaged communities with residents. This quasi-experimental study aimed to develop a value-based approach using likelihood ratio table and a Naïve Bayes classifier method to assess the success of a codesign programme, in comparison to past programmes with different design challenges. Methodology proposed a systematic investigation to evaluate this programme holistically. Students discussed with stakeholders to uncover the complexities of human and environmental factors in design at early stage of ideation, and semi-structured participants’ observation tasks were considered instead of researcher's observations in the method of assessment. Selected teams were introduced to two new design methods to empathise better with seniors, i.e., Care Circle and See and Shoot. Findings revealed that these teams showed greater levels of critical inquiry when overcoming three key challenges, i.e., (1) identifying key personas, (2) examining potential use environment, and (3) access to market.

The transportation sector is responsible for a relevant share of the total emissions and offers great potentials. It is necessary to implement as many zero-emission mobility systems as possible in the shortest time. For fast ferries, which are a relevant transport manner for a large share of the global population, technical issues could be solved and the successful operation was demonstrated. Up to today high-speed ships have been fully individually designed because physical effects demand for an individual optimisation for each use-case. Specifically for battery electric ships the overall efficiency is crucial to ensure not only an ecological but also economical operation.

With today's methods the design and production of such an individual designed ferry does take too long. To cover the rising demand, new approaches for mass production need to be established.

In this paper we describe a method for designing a platform for ships with the example of a battery electric fast ferry. The focus is on the actual modularisation, as other aspects like requirements or results of our example case are published elsewhere and are therefore just included briefly.

The method is validated on the world's first battery powered high-speed ferry.

Design aesthetics are one of the most important factors affecting the attractiveness of industrial products. Psychological theory suggests that a moderate level of novelty and complexity yields pleasant feelings in users. A design that is initially surprising to consumers and acceptable over time requires aesthetic interest associated with its novelty and complexity. In this study, we formulated the perceived novelty and complexity of a closed contour shape. Based on this formulation, we developed “Hybrid-GAN,” which is a shape-generation system capable of generating a variety of shapes of arbitrary novelty and complexity. In a series of experiment, we obtained subjective evaluations of novelty and complexity, as well as beauty and interest, for the generated shape samples. The results indicated that our novelty and complexity formulations had significant positive correlations with subjective evaluations. The sum of the formulated novelty and complexity also had a significant positive correlation with interest. The results of this study are expected to be used to support the design of attractive shapes by providing feedback to designers regarding the degrees of novelty and complexity that users find most pleasant.

Due to the increasing importance of advanced systems, whose development calls for interdisciplinary and integrative approaches, and fundamental changes in the work environment, leaders are required to have a wide range of competences. Therefore, the aim of this work is to identify competences of future leaders, that are specifically relevant in Advanced Systems Engineering (ASE). Thus, professional, social, methodological, and self competences developed by a literature review are validated through expert interviews and prioritized by a survey. The insights are then presented in a competence portfolio including 30 areas of competences. The portfolio consists of areas of competence that are either relevant in the context of ASE (e.g. intercultural and interdisciplinary competence), New Work (e.g. competence to empower employees) or are relevant to leaders in general. It was possible to add further aspects that are necessary in ASE to the aspects from the literature review. The experts interviewed emphasized various aspects of interdisciplinary work and made clear that in future, leaders should place their employees at the heart of their activities and empower them according to their strengths and weaknesses.

Government regulation shapes many aspects of the design of a product. This paper addresses the effect of the complexity of a regulation on product architecture through the structure of the regulation itself. The structure of a regulation derives from dependencies among requirements and parameters in the regulation that are ipso facto design elements. Since design elements such as requirements and parameters have no formal definition in regulation, it is difficult to identify them accurately and consistently. We apply two approaches to defining and coding requirements and parameters in the context of washing machine regulation. The two coding approaches generate networks of design elements that are analyzed to measure the complexity of the regulation and by extension the product. We find significant differences in the complexity of the regulation when coded in different ways and note deficiencies and strengths of each approach. These findings will support future research to measure the impact of regulatory complexity on product architecture.

Societies are faced to ecological crises and widening disparities. This has to be integrated in the management of complex projects as they are increasingly complex and impactful. Value Analysis can serve assessing the value of a project i.e. knowing how the project will be perceived by the Stakeholders. It is a collaborative approach that helps make decisions in the early stages of a complex project.

This paper aims at demonstrating that a new “Sustainable Value Analysis” (SVA) provides a decision-making support toward sustainability. SVA uses a new definition of Value and a set of indicators based on the Doughnut.

Methods for the introduction of sustainability in the upstream design phases have limitations, which are highlighted in the literature review. Yet, the potentials of value approaches can be shown. Based on this analysis, an illustrative case is proposed to demonstrate how to integrate the ecological and social dimensions in a classical Value Engineering approach to determine SVA. The article concludes that the SVA allows identifying and characterizing the sustainable dimensions of Value, through a collective approach based on Stakeholders.

The sustainable design transition has proven to be a challenging process, in part due to the diverse set of stakeholders, which includes the general public, policymakers, scientific researchers, and businesses. In prior work, the interconnected relationships among systematic drivers and barriers for sustainable design were identified and mapped using a causal loop diagram at a relatively abstract level. To further understand and characterize this complex system, this research aims to identify the relationship strength levels among the variables in the system, as indicated by previous research identified in the literature. In addition, the knowledge maturity levels of these identified relationships are specified to illustrate strengths and gaps in the literature. The findings are used to create a refined system representation that illustrates the power dynamics between systemic driving forces to sustainable design transitions. The results of this work reveal valuable insights about the linkages among the driving forces of sustainable design transitions that can be used as a foundation for further investigation, such as experiments and data analytics that can better quantify these relationships.

System maps are established tools in design practice and education as well as non-design research, both as a process and an outcome of systemic analysis and synthesis. Applying causal loop diagrams (CLD's) in (systemic) design research could be of great value to tackle the growing societal complexity. At this moment there is, however, no clear research protocol to include the rich data necessary for systemic research and ensure a scientifically valid system map in the context of design research. In this paper, we propose a protocol using CLD's as a research method and outcome in design-inclusive research. The protocol synthesises rich data from qualitative research in a way that the representation yields higher validity compared to the regular approach to systems mapping, using a process of reflection and iteration on boundary setting. An iterative process of qualitative research methods with lean validation methods was used to come to a conceptual proposal. The protocol can support systemic design researchers and practitioners to include a scientifically grounded CLD in the explorative research actions phase, thus bridging the research towards a phase of creative design actions.

Usage data of reference systems can be analyzed in the development process for the validation of system elements. The process model for data-driven validation of elements in the system of objectives aids developers in performing such data analyses. The conducted studies show that the basis for an efficient analysis process is a common understanding of the system and the goal of the analysis. Therefore, a template was derived over the course of case studies describing the elements in the system of objectives. The template covers the three descriptive dimensions general information, technical system and data. It allows a comprehensive description of analysis use cases. On average it takes 11 minutes for developers to aggregate all necessary information and consequently fill out the template. An A/B-Test confirmed the comprehensibility and applicability of the template even for developers of different domain knowledge. Through its contribution to a sustainable knowledge management the template provides an added value for the developers for conducting analysis.