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.

As part of the digital transformation towards Industry 4.0, the tasks of staff on the shop floor are changing. Despite increasing automation, complex assembly steps still have to be carried out by humans, especially when it comes to complex products rich in variants, whose assembly cannpt be fully automated for various reasons. Due to increasing individualization and the steadily growing complexity of products, providing the right information at the right time and in the right place is becoming more important. In this context, the visualization of information via novel technologies such as augmented reality plays a crucial role towards an efficient and error-free production process. This paper compiles existing challenges when using augmented reality as a visualization form for an assistance system. On the one hand, the challenges found originate from a systematic literature review and are organized according to predefined categories. On the other hand, these challenges are complemented and compared through findings gained from expert interviews, which are conducted with employees of two European commercial vehicle manufacturers in the field of production. The analysis of the two methods highlights the need for further research.

AR/VR applications are a valuable tool in product design and lifecycle. But the integration of AR/VR is not seamless, as CAD models need to be prepared for the AR/VR applications. One necessary data transformation is the tessellation of the analytically described geometry. To ensure the usability, visual quality and evaluability of the AR/VR application, time consuming optimisation is needed depending on the product complexity and the performance of the target device.

Widespread approaches to this problem are based on iterative mesh decimation. This approach ignores the varying importance of geometries and the required visual quality in engineering applications. Our predictive approach is an alternative that enables optimisation without iterative process steps on the tessellated geometry.

The contribution presents an approach that uses surface-based prediction and enables predictions of the perceived visual quality of the geometries. This contains the investigation of different geometric complexity metrics gathered from literature as basis for prediction models. The approach is implemented in a geometry preparation tool and the results are compared with other approaches.

Companies design, develop, and market new systems of products and services, through the process of translating beneficiaries’ needs into design specifications, where beneficiaries are those who generate value when using the new product or experiencing the new service enabled by the product. Successful new systems of products and services attract potential beneficiaries. This study explores how to identify the stakeholder engagement requirements of a new system at its early stage of development.

The study proposes a procedure and a tool - a new visual representation called the stakeholder-value map - to show the system development team how stakeholders are to interact with the system's key elements, and hence inform the timing of stakeholder involvement, for realising the value proposition of the new system. A working theoretical construct is also emerged from the study: for a new system to have a higher chance of market adoption, one can first visualise the ‘route’ of value-creation, from the lowest value-level product/service elements to the highest value-level service elements; then, identify the requirements for stakeholder engagement in the new system development.

Additive manufacturing (AM) processes are now integrated in industry. Therefore, new methods to design AM parts taken into consideration capabilities and limitations are necessary. It is very difficult for teachers to effectively guide students with ideas emerging from generative design tools. AM requires significant preparation and compromises. Topological optimization is also used depending on requirements. A significant impact on the final part quality is related to the part orientation and geometric dimensions. Therefore, this white paper focuses on detailed design steps to prepare future technicians and engineers to design for additive manufacturing. Active teaching pedagogy guideline is proposed. Students have to think in 3D and use analysis tools to create and validate the optimised design. They use immersive tools to review constraints and model diagnostic algorithm to generate data. Present approaches with design guidelines and tools enable to create AM rules based on it. Questionnaire shows that students need explicit knowledge information. Features recognition and geometry diagnostic are mandatory for complex model. Immersive tool helps to evaluate post-processing. They can now relate AM product-process relationship.

Emerging visualisation tools based on eXtended Reality (XR) platforms offer designers new possibilities and benefits, attracting increasing interest from academia and industry. However, as the users and consumers of these tools, practising designers' perceptions of XR visualisation tools need to be further verified as they shape the tools' acceptance and integration in the industry. This paper investigates industrial designers' acceptance of VR visualisation tools using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 designers from 3 countries to discuss their attitudes, motivations, experiences, and expectations regarding adopting VR visualisation tools as professional tools. The study highlights key opportunities to promote VR integration in industrial design as the tools' practical capabilities to support design performance and the social influence of stakeholders and peer designers on the professional use of VR. The main barriers lie in designers' expected effort to learn and use the tools and the investment and upkeep of VR systems and facilities in the industry. The paper concludes with recommendations for reaping benefits and overcoming barriers.

We investigate reverging - the phase between the diverging and converging steps in a creative process - in the context of a visual thinking agency. Creative facilitation literature advocates for such a phase, aimed at revisiting and rearranging ideas generated during diverging, to prepare for converging. However, in practice this step is often neglected or not performed well, resulting into a sense of increased complexity or lack of client ownership.

Two studies were used to investigate reverging in context: a preliminary study consisted of interviews and observations to better understand reverging in current visual thinking practices. The follow-up study focused on co-creating a tool to solve the problem identified in the preliminary study.

While the preliminary study revealed the need to involve clients in both diverging and reverging phases, the follow-up study resulted in the creation of the Whiteboard Canvas. The tool was tested in practice and several benefits of reverging in visual thinking practices emerged.

The tool empowers visual thinking practitioners to involve their clients more actively in reverging, resulting into a more deliberate creative process and an increased sense of client ownership.

One difficulty with sketching pedagogy is the tendency to assess growth according to outcomes, as opposed to processes. We assessed eye gaze patterns between advanced and intermediate design sketchers and anticipated correlations between eye-gaze practices and sketching proficiency. Participants sketched two different objects using analogue materials, a potted plant from memory, and a MacBook from observation.

The study utilised Tobii 3 adjustable eye-tracking glasses and Tobii Pro data processing software. Twenty-five design sketching students and six design sketching instructors participated in the study.

Metrics measured include the quantity of reference line gazes, eye movement during line creation (targeting vs tracking), eye fixation duration, work checks per minute and subject gazes per minute.

The results show a difference in gaze patterns between intermediate and advanced sketchers, both in terms of practice and consistency. Eye-tracking sketching behaviours has revealed a new understanding of how teaching gaze habits could lead to improved methods of design sketching instruction.

Using the EEG features extracted from the EEG signals, the presented study investigates differences in the cognitive load posed on engineers while 3D CAD modelling in two different conditions, depending on the visual representations used as stimulus - a 2D and a 3D technical drawing of parts. The results indicate a higher cognitive load during the 2D drawing task. In addition, common indicators of the ongoing spatial information processing were recognised - a suppression of parietal and occipital alpha power, a higher frontal theta, and differences in theta power between the hemispheres.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) can provide new air mobility faster and avoid city traffic with the growth of new technologies. But they need to be co-developed with the city infrastructure. Thus, understanding the working scenarios of UAM and how they will interact with the city and the other modes of transport systems is vital. Storyboarding helps policymakers, city planners, designers, and investors better understand the product's contextual interaction over time. This process allows the design team to be implicit or express a design that is easy to understand, reflect upon, or modify.

This paper reports a preliminary study (N=16) exploring vividness of visual mental imagery in product design ideation. Vividness was observed to vary across designers in the study, from high (68.8% of participants) to moderate (18.8%) to low (12.5%). A significant, strong positive relationship was found between vividness and creativity. Most participants reported using imagery always or sometimes, except one who has difficulties forming mental images. The results have several implications, including the possibility of other ‘ways of imagining’ not captured by visual reasoning models of design.

Digitalisation is making significant inroads into society at the same time as the general commercial trend is to able to personalise the product one acquires. The field of digital product representation, and the techniques for adopting a particular product in accordance with the customer's expectations, have become very important corporate assets. From a company's perspective these assets can be leveraged both for internal efficiency and also for different types of external customer interactions. In this article, the standpoint is that product geometry forms the foundation for digital product representation. It is from this perspective that the geometrical ecosystem comes into focus. Geometry creation and geometry consumption, in combination with geometrical configuration management, are high-value areas that must be mastered. A research-based 20-year industrial perspective building up such capabilities serves as an example. The article concludes with a forward-looking perspective on potential areas for continued exploration on this journey.

Human augmentation is a thriving research field that aims to amplify human abilities through the development of technological improvements as an integral part of the human body. Human augmentation products may be made for anyone, ranging from healthy users wanting to enhance their human abilities to users who face temporary or permanent disabilities, physical impairments, or perilous situations that oblige them to use these products.

This article attempts to introduce readers to the domain of human augmentation by providing a thorough formulation of the concept and its related terms to develop a more solid structural basis. Additionally, a categorical and dimensional classification of the field was given. Based on these findings, we then proposed a novel framework in the form of a diagrammatic presentation of both classifications, which could enable product designers to better understand and characterize the type of human augmentation product they are designing by determining its location in the diagram. Finally, the proposed framework was evaluated by introducing and classifying several significant human augmentation products most of which have proven to successfully exceed human abilities.

One challenge with design automation is system transparency with adjustable granularity because of the many different forms of representation from multiple disciplines. Previous research has focused on visualization through the generation of graphs, packaging into electronic books, and model highlighting. The research presented in this paper focuses instead on a visual programming approach, commonly applied in the building industry, where design assets and external references are wrapped into visual components and managed on a canvas with information input/output relations displayed. This entails additional documentation efforts, but the visualization is arguably more useful as groups and levels of granularity are adjusted by the engineers themselves as a part of the development work. To explore visual programming and its potential benefits as a way of enabling transparency with adjustable granularity of DA systems within mechanical manufacturing industry, an existing textual design automation system was transformed into a visual one using Grasshopper® (a visual programming environment) and discussed with respect to DA system transparency, feature-based CAD, and DA system development.

Engineers often need to discover and learn designs from unfamiliar domains for inspiration or other particular uses. However, the complexity of the technical design descriptions and the unfamiliarity to the domain make it hard for engineers to comprehend the function, behavior, and structure of a design. To help engineers quickly understand a complex technical design description new to them, one approach is to represent it as a network graph of the design-related entities and their relations as an abstract summary of the design. While graph or network visualizations are widely adopted in the engineering design literature, the challenge remains in retrieving the design entities and deriving their relations. In this paper, we propose a network mapping method that is powered by Technology Semantic Network (TechNet). Through a case study, we showcase how TechNet’s unique characteristic of being trained on a large technology-related data source advantages itself over common-sense knowledge bases, such as WordNet and ConceptNet, for design knowledge representation.

Visual representations are essential to design. Data-rich representations such as systems visualisations are gaining prominence in engineering practice. However, as such visualisations are often developed ad-hoc, we propose more systematically to link visual tasks with design-specific tasks for which the visualisations are used. Whereas research on such linking focuses mostly on CAD models and sketches, no such studies are yet available for systems visualisations. Thus, this paper introduces a typology of visual tasks from the Information Visualisation field to aid the development of systems visualisations in design. To build a visualisation using the typology, a case study with engineering students developing an autonomous robot was conducted. Through interviews and analysis of product representations used, design-specific tasks were identified and decomposed into visual tasks. Then, a visualisation that assisted the team in performing their design activities was created. Results illustrate the benefits of using such a typology to describe visual tasks and generate systems visualisations. The study suggests implications for researchers studying visual representations in design as well as for developers of systems visualisations.

Patent analysis is a popular topic of research. However, designers do not engage with patents in the early design stage, as patents are time-consuming to read and understand due to their intricate structure and the legal terminologies used. Manually produced graphical representations of patent working principles for improving designers’ awareness of prior art have been demonstrated in previous research. In this paper, an automated approach is presented, utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify the invention working principle from the patent independent claims and produce a visualisation. The outcomes of this automated approach are compared with previous manually produced examples. The results indicate over 40% match between the automatic and manual approach, which is a good basis for further development. The comparison suggests that the automated approach works well for features and relationships that are expressed explicitly and consistently but begin to lose accuracy when applied to complex sentences. The comparison also suggests that the accuracy of the proposed automated approach can be improved by using a trained part-of-speech (POS) tagger, improved parsing grammar and an ontology.

Digital design tools have dominated engineering and design practice offering many advantages that ultimately improve efficiency in the design process. Digital sketching is one such example of these tools yet, its current use is primarily to present work to stakeholders (External Communication). It is relatively underused to externalise ideas (Externalisation) where sketching on paper is still favoured. This paper aims to understand the characteristics of digital sketching that motivate or discourage designers to use the tool. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 designers to gain insights on the tool's use in External Communication and Externalisation. Results highlight a trade-off between fidelity of visualisations and time and effort expended to achieve visualisations. The key difference between the use scenarios is the way in which this trade-off is connected to managing stakeholder involvement. While designers acknowledge advantages that digital sketching can offer in externalisation, it is viewed as requiring a level of detail to begin use. In conclusion we suggest segmenting roles of digital sketching in terms of the characteristics identified in this study would help to motivate use in Externalisation.