We review the scholarly contributions that utilise natural language processing (NLP) techniques to support the design process. Using a heuristic approach, we gathered 223 articles that are published in 32 journals within the period 1991–present. We present state-of-the-art NLP in-and-for design research by reviewing these articles according to the type of natural language text sources: internal reports, design concepts, discourse transcripts, technical publications, consumer opinions and others. Upon summarising and identifying the gaps in these contributions, we utilise an existing design innovation framework to identify the applications that are currently being supported by NLP. We then propose a few methodological and theoretical directions for future NLP in-and-for design research.

In recent years, co-creation and collaboration platforms to create and deliver new products and services have taken a step forward; this has led to the development of a new active involvement of users, who from co-designers have become independent designers, even if not experts. Co-design is dynamic and provides the tools to generate democratic design processes guided by the users themselves. The democratization of design tools is the premise for a new paradigm defined ‘Diffuse Design’ by Manzini (2015). This contribution explores the approaches of open design and open production with particular attention to the field of visual communication and the production of motion design artifacts. After an introduction to the co-design framework, the main open-production visual communication platforms are presented to offer an overview of the topic. Next, the potential of online platforms to enable non-designers to produce animated artifacts is explored by examining student projects in a motion design University course. The most significant outputs of the student experience are then described and critically analyzed. Finally, the conclusions investigate the different perspectives for reading the democratization of tools for creating visual artifacts and lay the foundations for future lines of research.

Idea selection is crucial in design as it impacts the outcome of a project. A collaborative design activity could be considered as a social process where the interactions and individual states (such as the importance in the team and self-efficacy level) could affect decision-making. It is often seen in design teams that some individuals, referred to as ‘influencers’ in the article have more capacity to influence than others, hence they govern the team process for better or worse. Due to the limited work done in the past to study the effect of these influencers on design outcomes, the work aims at increasing the understanding by presenting some insights from its agent-based simulation. The simulation results show how different influencer team compositions affect design outcomes in terms of quality and exploration of the solutions. The idea selection starts with the agents who are ready with their solution in their ‘mind’. The work presented in this article describes a framework for simulating decision-making during idea selection by considering the influencer and majority effect. The empirical study presented in the article verifies the model logic, that is, the presence of influencer and the majority during idea selection and supports the assumption that individuals’ agreement on solutions proposed by other team members depends on the degree of influence and past agreement. The results of the simulation show that teams with well-defined influencers produced solutions with higher variety and had more uniform contributions from team members, but also produced solutions of lower quality.

Taking the perspective of users and stakeholders can help designers incorporate human-centricity in their practice. However, we know relatively little of the dynamics of perspective taking – a cognitive facet of empathy – in design processes as a situated cognitive and behavioural activity, rather than as an overall orientation. To illuminate how perspective taking is used in design, we carried out a longitudinal multiple case study of 49-month-long graduate-level product and service design projects, exploring differences between high and midscale performance in different design phases. Through thematic analysis of review session discussions, we find that perspective taking in high-performing sessions involves three aggregate dimensions: gathering data to form perspectives, scoping and making sense of perspectives and using perspectives in creative processing. We identify phase-dependent characteristics for the scope and emphasis of perspective taking in concept development, system design and detailed design. We also describe different ways in which novice teams struggled to create and apply user perspectives. As a result, the current study sheds light on perspective taking and the changing nature of effective perspective taking across the design process.

This paper presents the process considerations contained within the first ever framework for implementing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) within high-value Engineering-to-Order (ETO) programmes. The scientific contribution of the research is the identification of the process-oriented factors that are instrumental in the successful implementation of PLM within an ETO context. The framework has been developed using a qualitative methodology based on the thematic analysis of 27 semi-structured interviews. The participants were senior personnel from 11 ETO organisations in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, the United States and Canada. The thematic analysis resulted in framework themes described in relation to the process objectives, challenges or enablers, and the contributing elements of the themes were then synthesised to illustrate their interconnectedness in supporting PLM implementation. Validation of the framework using 19 participants selected from seven ETO organisations resulted in 95% agreement with statements that assessed the quality, structure and versatility of the framework. This research contributed to the updated BAE Systems Maritime Naval Ships PLM strategy for the design, build and in-service support for the First of Class new generation Royal Navy vessel for a recent shipbuilding programme.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are very quiet at low speed, which can be hazardous for pedestrians, especially visually impaired people. It is now mandatory (since mid-2019 in Europe) to add external warning sounds, but poor sound design can lead to noise pollution, and consequently annoyance. Moreover, it is possible that EVs are not sufficiently detectable in urban areas because of the masking effect from the background noise. In this paper, we propose a method for the design of warning sounds that takes into account both detectability and unpleasantness. The method implements a multiobjective interactive genetic algorithm (IGA) for the optimisation of the characteristics of synthesised sounds. An experiment is proposed to a first panel of participants in order to define a set of Pareto efficient sounds. At the individual level, sounds obtained with the IGA are compared to different sound design proposals. Results show that the quality of the sounds designed by the IGA method is comparable to those provided by a sound designer. From the sounds of the Pareto set, a design recommendation method based on the probability distributions of the sounds’ characteristics is proposed. An external validation with a second panel of participants shows that these recommended sounds constitute relevant trade-offs when compared to other design proposals.

Complexity in product design increases with little understanding of cause and effect. As a consequence, the impact of design decisions (or changes) on the product is difficult to predict and control. This article presents a model of cause and effect for design decisions that avoid circular dependencies: the so-called attribute dependency graph (ADG) models complex system behaviour and properties, and increases transparency by carefully distinguishing between what is realised and what is required. An ADG is a polyhierarchy, with design variables (directly controllable) at the bottom, quantities of interest (not directly controllable) on the top, and intermediate attributes. The dependencies represent causality in a simple sense: assigning values to design variables, representing the cause, will determine the values of the dependent attributes, representing the effect. ADGs do not account for what is required, but for what effects emerge by design activity. A set of rules makes them independent of designers’ views. They provide the structure for so-called INUS conditions, that is, insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions that can be used for requirement development. The modelling approach is applied to one simple synthetic and then to two real-world design problems, the design of a water hose box and a passenger vehicle.

In recent years, ‘living lab (LL)’, a design approach that actively involves users as partners from the early stage of the design process, has been attracting much attention. Compared with the traditional participatory design or co-design approaches, one of the distinctive features of the LL approach is that the process of and opportunity for user participation tends to be long-term and complex. Thus, LL practitioners must appropriately plan and design effective integration of user participation into the design process to promote co-creation with users. In other words, LL practitioners are required to ‘configure user participation’ for the effective promotion of co-creation. However, to date, the knowledge on how to properly configure long-term and complex user participation in LLs has not been systematically clarified, nor have its methodologies been developed. This study develops a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs. Through a literature review and analysis on LL case studies, we identified the 11 key elements in five categories that should be considered while configuring user participation in LLs. Furthermore, on the basis of the identified elements, we developed a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs, which is called the participation blueprint. We have demonstrated its use and have also discussed its theoretical and practical contributions to the LL and co-design research community.

Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method’s tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method’s intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.

This paper critically reviews literature about design framing to clarify an understanding of what is meant by the construct of a design frame. It describes the origins of the term design frame and characterises three distinct definitions that can be found within the literature. It reviews empirical studies of design framing to highlight definitional confusion between studies. It discusses the significance of Dorst’s propositional model of design frames and juxtaposes design frames with other related constructs. It clarifies ways that the resolution of nomenclature for describing design framing might lead to a more coherent body of empirical research into this topic. It suggests that there is value in developing a better cognitive model of design framing and outlines potential steps towards such a model.

Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.