While the form of building construction delivery known as Integrated Design-Build (or Integrated Project Delivery) is necessary for handling the complexity of modern projects, it raises up a host of problems due to the amount and variety of stakeholders that are brought together to co-design. Namely, the difficulty in forming a shared mental model of expectations regarding the project can cause disappointment in the results, as well as time and cost overruns. This paper is about creating an intervention to alleviate those issues. Employing knowledge from the field of rhetoric in design, and of mental models, two Integrated Design-Build workshops were analyzed to extract a set of rhetorical topics (topoi) to all such sessions. A design game was formulated around the empirical data by an iterative design process, following established design game theory. The game was found to indeed more than double the alignment of a group's individual mental models, though more testing is needed to validate this.

Companies that operate and manufacture products in the technical area are exposed to increasingly challenging market situations. The developed products should be individualized to the customers' needs while offering high quality at an acceptable price.

The temporal and especially economic claims are constantly growing, forcing the companies to develop a given product that matches the cost-side as well as the technical requirements in a short period of time. Following an initial development, it is often necessary to provide further product variants regarding a modified geometry or performance. A time and cost efficient way is the scaling of the initially developed product.

Existing scaling methods focus on uniform geometry changes, not taking into account influences from non-uniform requirement or geometry alterations. Therefore, this article proposes an approach on how to modell and assess the outcome of a scaled assembly, based on the connection of individual scalable components inside an object-based approach.

This paper proposes a method to automatically generate a multi-domain matrix (MDM) from textual activity specifications. The format for specifying these activities is based on a structured grammar derived from natural language and consists of two types of activities: goal activities and transformation activities. A goal activity describes the purpose of an action performed by an actor for the benefit of another actor in the system. A transformation activity describes an activity from the viewpoint of a single actor, who receives, generates, and outputs information or artifacts. If one describes activities using these two types of activity specifications, dependencies can be automatically derived between actors, activities, and parameters of the system and visualized in an MDM. Thus the generated MDM presents an organization DSM (actors), a process DSM (activities), and a parameter DSM (flows of information or objects), as well as the mapping matrices coupling the different domains. An illustrative house construction example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed activity specification format. The method may provide an outcome in understanding and managing complex systems.

Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) confronts traditional design practice. Instead of reproducing and reinforcing contemporary perceptions of products and services, SCD seeks to change them, with the goal to spur a public debate e.g. on what is a preferable societal development. SCD methods comprise among others speculative narratives and design of critical objects. However, the theoretical fundament of SCD is feeble, and concepts and methods are upheld of mere examples.

The article aims to present the features, methods, and practice of SCD, and locate it in the design field. Following the introduction, section 2 presents features and SCD methods and practices. Section 3 links SCD to traditional design and identifies benefits and challenges relating to its role as a supplement to today's design practice. The final section suggests topics for further SCD research.

The article benefits designers in search for alternatives to commercially oriented design approaches. Findings indicate that SCD can contribute to creating new societal roles for designers, foster innovation in the relationship between designers and users, and encourage creativity through imaginative aesthetics.

Systematic literature reviews (SRs) are a way of synthesising scientific evidence to answer a particular research question in a way that is transparent and reproducible, while seeking to include all published evidence on the topic and appraising the quality of this evidence. SRs have become a major methodology in disciplines such as public policy research and health sciences. Some have advocated that design research should adopt the method. However, little guidance is available. This paper provides an overview of the SR method, based on the literature in health sciences. Then, the rationale for SRs in design research is explored, and four recent examples of SRs in design research are analysed to illustrate current practice. Foreseen challenges in taking forward the SR method in design research are highlighted, and directions for developing a SR method for design research are proposed. It is concluded that SRs hold potential for design research and could help us in addressing some important issues, but work is needed to define what review methods are appropriate for each type of research question in design research, and to adapt guidance to our own needs and specificities.

A prototype can be generally defined as a preliminary version of a final product and it can represent both aesthetic and functional features. Prototyping, the process of building a prototype, constitutes an indispensable part of product development processes. Many classifications of prototypes which use a different range of criteria have already been developed and are known as Prototype Taxonomies. This paper proposes an agenda towards the development of a new taxonomic classification which will be based on a prototype's attributes and its intended purpose. This work is justified from the results of an analysis of 8 existing prototype taxonomies which indicate that there is not a taxonomy that explicitly uses the prototypes’ purposes as its basic taxonomic dimension. A definition of the term ‘Prototype Purpose’ is proposed through discussing the differences and relations to the term ‘Prototype Role’. This work results in a list of 23 explicit prototype purposes which arise from 7 roles of prototyping found in relevant literature: Learning, Communication, Demonstration, Integration, Refinement, Exploration and Requirement Elicitation.

In the design phase of product development (PD) process, most new products face significant uncertainties and risks. Uncertainty is typically associated with a lack of information, while learning is a process that acquires information. Therefore, learning fast and at low cost decreases the uncertainty and increases the efficiency of the product design phase. This paper investigates the concept of the cost of learning in PD's design phase. Reviewing the literature, we conceptualize the cost of learning and review the learning methods considering three aspects in the design phase of the PD process: (1) costs associated with learning from mistakes and failures, (2) learning methods and (3) categories of learners. This paper thus provides the conceptual foundations for future work to increase the efficiency of the PD process by reducing the cost of learning from mistakes and failures.

Coherence is important in the design of products, because it makes them easier to understand for their users. Designers can use different representation modes to express ideas about coherence. However, perception of a representation can be influenced by its mode. Therefore, designers must be aware of the influences that different representation modes can have on perception of coherence.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of experienced modality on perception of conceptual coherence. In the study, participants were divided into two conditions for two representation modes: written word and physical object, both representing the same concepts. Each participant was presented with the concepts as words or objects and asked to list the properties of each concept. The results showed that between the two conditions, frequencies of responses were similar while frequencies of response contents were dissimilar and sometimes contrary. The main findings suggest that the effects of the modalities, written word and physical object, do not differ significantly for mental activity, but do differ considerably for semantic processing in ways that has implications for design.

Successful companies spend many of their resources in the initiation and realisation of innovation projects, which might be successful at the market. Especially in the early phase of these projects, there is a high degree of uncertainty and therefore, product profiles established themselves as methodological support for product developers. However, it is not possible to give developers a straight and always equal process to follow for developing these product profiles. Based on this problem, this contribution investigates context-independent process steps to develop promising product profiles. Thus, this work provides a possible reference process to develop product profiles to support product developers in the early stage of innovation projects. Therefore, 631 process steps of 16 innovation projects were analysed and 100 process steps were derived from literature. Based on an expert workshop, 48 of these process steps were identified as relevant to consider in a context-independent reference process model. In a further empirical Live-Lab study, process patterns were investigated and the usability and relevance of the process steps were evaluated as positive.

This piece of work is concerned with how shapes are generated, explored and transformed during the architectural designing process. It postulates that the relations and connections between sketches, produced during the design activity, can be defined in terms of shape transformations and described according to a closed list of shape operators. These latters provide a formal description of the shape exploration process and allow a deep understanding of its logic. To achieve its goal, this study creates a model to describe the different shape transformations, performed by designers, during the sketching activity.

Samsung recently introduced a new smartphone display with increased breaking resistance, which will probably be relevant for future cars as well. This example shows that subsystems, in general artefacts from former development processes can be relevant for subsequent projects. Their integration has to be planned, i.a. even before the original product is in the market and across branches. The research on supporting methods requires a suitable description model for this phenomenon. Research in design reuse and PGE – product generation engineering addresses this only partially yet. Design reuse focuses on the informational aspect, PGE refers primarily to reference products. This contribution aims at closing this gap as a basis for future research. Two case studies from industry projects by the authors and an example from foresight and product planning show the role of artefacts from former development processes in running projects. It is described which artefacts are used as a reference, why they are used and when. Based on these findings the authors propose the term “reference system” to depict the whole set of artefacts, which serves as a basis for every product development project.

Prototyping as a central method within innovation- and product development processes has a high acceptance in industry. Various prototyping tools provide impressive visualizations of product ideas in early development stages and especially low fidelity prototyping methods seem easily applicable. However, a closer look at prototyping in practice reveals a number of misunderstandings and barriers regarding effective prototyping, often related to different stakeholders’ (e.g., developer, designer, client) ideas about the purpose of prototyping. Based on a combination of literature analysis, adapting existing models and methods in user centered design (e.g., personas, double diamond design process) and empirical results from industrial research cooperation, we introduce a focus group format and a first model of prototyping maturity, which can help organizations to reflect on their state of practice in prototyping on an individual, team, and organizational level. The maturity model also forms a valuable theoretical lens for design research. Thus, our research aims at researchers in the field of prototyping as well as practitioners involved in prototyping and innovation processes.

The objective of this research is to support DfX considerations in the early phases of design. In order to do conduct DfX, designers need access to pertinent downstream knowledge that is keyed to early stage design activities and problem knowledge. Product functionality is one such “key” connection between early understanding of the design problem and component choices which dictate product performance and impact, and repositories of design knowledge are one way to archive such design knowledge. However, curation of design knowledge is often a time-consuming activity requiring expertise in product modeling. In this paper, we explore a method to automate the populating of design repositories to support the overall goal of having up-to-date repositories of product design knowledge. To do this, we mine information from an existing repository to better understand the relationships between the components, functions, and flows of products. The resulting knowledge can be applied to automate functional decompositions once a product's components have been entered and thus reliably provide that “key” between early design activities and the later, component dependent characteristics.

Fidelity is one of the most important parameters to consider when dealing with prototypes, which affect the related costs and performances. Current literature contributions often rely on generic definitions of Fidelity based on the concept of closeness. However, the review performed in this paper revealed that Fidelity is a more complex concept, which considers (at least) eight main dimensions, mutually interrelated, and potentially characterized by many other potential sub-dimensions. The identified set has been applied to an industrial case study were a real engineering prototype has been assessed in terms of Fidelity. In particular, the case study application shows how the different dimensions can be interrelated each other. Furthermore, some important research hints have been highlighted in this paper, where the identified set of Fidelity dimensions paves the way for the related future activities.

The design of systems today often involves computer simulation to assess performance and design margins. Understanding how variability erases design margin is important to assure adequacy of margins, especially in optimization efforts. In this paper, we develop a toolchain using open source code libraries in Python, and encapsulate it in Jupyter notebooks, to provide an open source, interactive uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis toolchain. This works generally with simulation tools, where a reference folder is created containing a script that reads an input file of parameter values and runs the simulation. With that easily created, the toolchain executes the necessary uncertainty quantification steps with replicates of that reference folder. This approach fits within a broader workflow outlined that defines the variation modes to study, maps to simulation inputs, and screens the variables for sensitivity before conducting an uncertainty quantification. An example is shown in the simulation analysis of a Stirling engine.

Materials experience in design involves the meanings that materials convey to users through its expressive characteristics. Such meaning evoking patterns are influenced by parameters such as context, product (e.g.shape) and user. Consequently, there is a need to standardise experiential material characterisation and large-scale data collection, by means of a meaning-less or ‘neutral’ demonstrator to objectively compare materials.

This paper explores the conception of this neutrality and proposes two opposing strategies: neutrality through complexity or through simplicity. In a pre-study with 20 designers, six associative pairs are selected as neutrality criteria, and shaped in 240 forms by 20 (non) designers in a main workshop. Following the simplicity strategy, these forms are averaged out in three steps by a team of five designers, based on a consensus on of delicate-rugged, aggressive-calm, futuristic-calm, masculine-feminine, traditional-modern, and toylike-professional, resulting in a selection of four averaged neutral forms.

Finally, future research will focus on complexity to increase interactivity, so that consumers might be triggered in extensive material exploration.

Previous research has shown the importance of contextual factors for increasing employee innovativeness, but to effectively support innovative behavior, we need to also understand what forms of support are perceived as meaningful by the employees themselves. The current study investigated the experiences of 35 early-career engineers in creating, championing and implementing new ideas at the workplace. They reported relatively few instances of support that had been experienced as helpful, and nearly all of these were related to either managerial or co-worker support. This support ranged from encouragement and positive feedback to tangible help in troubleshooting and finding resources, and, in the case of managers, providing sufficient autonomy and responsibility to enable the interviewees to pursue their ideas. Managerial support was most frequently reported by those working in self-described innovative positions, whereas co-worker support was more commonly reported by those working in self- described innovative environments. Formal processes and incentives were less likely to have been perceived as helpful than informal interactions with managers and co-workers.

Visual stimuli can be useful in supporting design ideation process. However, researchers still know very little about how stimuli should be delivered to designers during the early design stage. This question is crucial to the effective use of stimuli because previous researches have proved that ill-presented stimuli can have a negative impact on design creativity. Therefore, an empirical study was conducted with the aim of exploring if and how combinational pictorial stimuli can affect designers' creative performance. Results from a total of 36 participants show that the design outcomes presented by the group exposed to combinational pictorial stimuli were more creative than those given by the group exposed to no stimuli or randomly presented pictorial stimuli. These results imply that the form of stimuli delivery can affect creative design outcomes and combinational pictorial stimuli best support design creativity among these three conditions. These findings give us a better understanding of the roles that visual stimuli play in design, which is expected to bring us important implications for both design education and design support tool development

With the surging number of digital devices penetrating our daily routines, the risks inherent to cybersecurity—the protection of data on digital products connected to the Internet—have also increased since these devices (e.g., connected home devices, personal monitoring) collect, process, analyze and store users’ sensitive personal information. Thus, there is a pressing need to assist users in being aware of and dealing with potential cybersecurity threats. With the proposition that fulfilling the need starts with developing an in-depth understanding of the user behaviors in the context of cybersecurity, an exploratory study was conducted that employed three mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods—a trend analysis, an interview study, and an online survey study. The paper reports the user characteristics on (1) awareness levels of cybersecurity issues, (2) uses of digital devices, and (3) means of dealing with the privacy issues in product use. The results of the studies were translated into eight personas that systematically reflect distinct characteristics of users, which can help designers empathize with their potential users vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.

Information collection may affect the design quality and designer's performance through changing the structure of information and the way how information is searched and organized. Based on the theoretical analysis conducted by Wang et al., the present work continues to investigate the influence of designer's natural choice of information collection strategy on his/her mental stress both theoretically and empirically. Designers’ stresses are quantified from HRV data and are compared under different information collection strategies.