For the past 5 years, more and more established technological firms have structured domain of expertise dedicated to breakthrough innovation management, in order to foster their innovative capabilities. Our paper studies how such expertise may be organised to identify and exploit more effectively new design paths. Our case study is based on the Renault's experts who demonstrate how the design theories could support the firm's innovation capabilities through an exploration partnership. The conclusion presents new co-exploration models and proposes organisations of the expert's activities.

“C-K theory”, a theory of reasoning in design, offers a formal modelling language with the power to describe the unfolding of creativity and the generation of new innovative objects as integral parts of design practice. However, the theory has limited ability to analyze and describe the particulars of design practice when the target area is service. To address this question, the purpose of this paper is to refine the “C-K theory” by embedding service relevant constructs and exploring strategies for enhancing the creative engagement resulting in the innovative service concepts.

An important step when designers use machine learning models is annotating user generated content. In this study we investigate inter-rater reliability measures of qualitative annotations for supervised learning. We work with previously annotated product reviews from Amazon where phrases related to sustainability are highlighted. We measure inter-rater reliability of the annotations using four variations of Krippendorff's U-alpha. Based on the results we propose suggestions to designers on measuring reliability of qualitative annotations for machine learning datasets.

Many research students find challenges when validating their research. Especially when they have expectations to contribute to both practice and the research body of knowledge. This paper argues that a key to successful validation of design research lies in the ability to focus on what to validate in advance of how to validate. The paper provide a set of guidelines to support a discussion on how to converge to a claim that actually can be validated. The paper reports on experiences from PhD level course on validation in design research.

During engineering design, designers employ three types of model: physical, virtual and cognitive. The role and contribution of each is documented in literature albeit fragmented in nature. Consequentially, a gap in understanding exists in terms of how these models and the transitions between them impact the designer and design process. This paper begins to address this through a characterisation of each model class and an appraisal of the transitional pathways including their alignment to seminal design frameworks.

Hierarchies of knowledge represent a popular formalism for conceptualizing beliefs, justifications, and truth statements. To capitalize on the opportunity for formulating effective maps of design knowledge, this article introduces the hierarchical context–design development–high-level (CDH) model that stratifies different bodies of design-specific knowledge into ranked levels. We compare it with existing hierarchical models of knowledge, and describe its unique uses and benefits for both design research and design practice.

The requirements on validity for studies in design research are very high. Therefore, this paper aims at identifying challenges that occur when setting up studies and suggests solution strategies to address them. Three different institutes combining their experience discussed several studies in a workshop. Resulting main challenges are to find a suitable task, to operationalise the variables and to deal with a high analysis effort per participant. Automation in data evaluation and a detailed practical guideline on studies in design research are considered necessary.

The concept of involving user perspectives into product development processes has its roots in the early 1960s. Although this seems to be following a quite long tradition, as a design research field, it did not improve substantially and, so far, no consistent perception or even definition of the concept can be found. The paper points out where design research on user involvement still lacks methodological and theoretical foundation and makes the attempt of providing impulses for systemizing the existing body of knowledge within the Design Society as a research community.

The digitalisation of the industry offers new opportunities to discuss design activities and support tools. Advancement in AI allows thinking about new Designer-AI tools interaction in the design process. The paper aims to initiate a characterisation of tools issued from researches in the application of AI in Design to rethink the division of work between Designer-AI tools. The paper is based on the literature on the concept of Levels of Automation in cognitive engineering, manufacturing and robotics, and proposes a grid of characterisation of the Level of Automation for the design process.

The aim of the present work is to show possibilities with which 3D models in virtual reality (VR) can be created and exported. First an overview of the existing hard- and software is given. Subsequently, existing solution concepts are analysed which, however, are not used in product development. Based on these knowledge a concept for the creation of 3D models in VR and the export of these models is developed.

The paper presents a systematic literature review investigating definitions, uses, and application of data-driven design in the concept development process. The analysis shows a predominance of the use of text mining techniques on social media and online reviews to identify customers’ needs, not exploiting the opportunity granted by the increased accessibility of IoT in cyber-physical systems. The paper argues that such a gap limits the potential of capturing tacit customers’ needs and highlights the need to proactively plan and design for a transition toward data-driven design.

Overspecification or excess margin in a design can enhance its ability to absorb changes and uncertainty, but also deteriorates performance criteria such as weight and cost. This paper shows how the Margin Value Method (article in review) can be applied in conjunction with CAE tools such as FEA to quantify excess margin where a design is too complex for algebraic analysis. This new application context for the MVM is illustrated using a case study of a flange coupling design, in which topology optimisation is used within the MVM to identify opportunities for design improvement.

The development of product-service systems (PSS) requires the design of value propositions, which involves challenging activities. In the context of business model innovation, gamification is presented as a practical mechanism to support the design process. This study aims to create a prototype of a gamified approach to design PSS value propositions and to compare its application to a traditional design approach. Based on a design experiment, the advantages and problems for both approaches were evaluated, providing insights for further development of the new version of the gamified approach.

Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) differs from other forms of AR by allowing the projection of digital images onto a model. This allows the AR to be more tangible and for interaction to be more realistic. The scale of the model plays a role in the realism but may be constrained by technical factors. This study attempts to understand the influence scale has on a design session by analysing the concept generation process, the ease of designing and the design behaviour. Understanding how these factors are influenced by the model scale betters the understanding of how SAR can influence design.

The automotive community has found to design and test autonomous systems, traditional CAE tools are not enough. The number of sensors and controls involved makes it very difficult to predict all the possible scenarios and system reactions to them. An approach to provide input to all the sensors and control systems is to use gaming engines. They are used “headless”, and in other cases with multiple users in the environment. In this paper we will highlight one case on how they are changing how the Army designs, tests, and sets requirements for autonomous ground systems.

To enhance the success of innovations, various methods for foresight have been developed. Automatization yields the potential of shifting effort away from the process to the actual in-depth analysis of resulting scenarios in scenario-technique. Within this paper, an approach based on a user-specific classification of input factors (consistency values) is presented. Generic consistency patterns used for a semi-automatized consistency assessment based on artificial neural networks are identified using a case study approach. Hereby, the effort for scenario-technique can be reduced significantly.

In design engineering, the early consideration of tolerance chains contributes to robust design. For this, a link of design and tolerancing domains is essential. This paper presents a combination of the graph-based tolerancing approach and the Contact and Channel approach to link these domains. The combined approach is applied at a coinage machine. Here it provides detailed insights into state-dependent relations of embodiment and functions, which can improve robustness evaluation of the concept. This approach shows a possibility to bridge the gap between design and tolerancing domains.

Conceptual design, as an early phase of the design process, is known to have the highest impact on determining the innovation level of design results. Although many tools exist to support designers in conceptual design, additional knowledge, especially knowledge related to emerging technologies, is still often needed. In this paper the authors aim to propose a data-driven creative concept generation and evaluation approach to support designers in incorporating emerging technologies in the new product early development stage. The approach is demonstrated by means of an illustrated example.

Combinational creativity can play a significant role in supporting designers to produce creative ideas during the early stages of new product development. This paper explores conceptual distances in combinational creativity from computational perspectives. A study conducted indicates that different computational measurements show different conceptual distance results. However, the study suggests far-related ideas could lead to outcomes that are more creative than closely-related ones. This paper provides useful insights into exploring future computational design support tools.