eHealth development faces the challenge of generating evidence about health effectiveness in real-world settings. Designers can potentially support this challenge but must understand health approaches to evidence generation about health outcomes. This case study investigates how health and care professionals conceptualise health outcomes and their evidence generation in eHealth. Our results identify three key conceptual dimensions: effect, meaning, and collection. We discuss how these inform future design competencies to support evidence generation about health outcomes in eHealth design.

The global elderly population rises, increasing dementia cases. Built environment impact on dementia health outcomes is known, forming the basis for evidence-based design studies. There's a need for a comprehensive assessment framework due to the complexity of interactions among Architectural Variables (AVs) and Health and Care Outcomes (HCOs). This paper proposes using Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to create such a framework. It collects data from 105 studies on 40 AVs, 36 HCOs, and 396 interactions. MBSE offers a holistic understanding, aiding healthcare facility design decisions.

In this study, the relationship between user experience, product appearance and emotional impressions generated by the user are examined through electric concept cars introduced by automotive companies in motor shows. The focus of the research is on the measurement of the emotional experiences that the interior design of the electric concept cars awakens in the user. The main purpose of the study is to open a discussion on the relation between the emotional impressions and product appearance.

Gestures are a preferred mode of interaction for smartwatches and these are commonly elicited either by expert/designers or by users. This paper aims to understand the most promising approach for generating and assessing gestures by employing two empirical studies to validate a set of expert/designer-generated gestures. It further gains insights into the users' mental models, their role as co-creators, and their considerations for one-handed gestures in smartwatches, and discusses the virtue of incorporating both approaches of gesture elicitation.

The modular design harbors a potential development in the prosumer scope that has hardly been previously exploited. Their joint application can lead to products focused on user participation through modular design. This work proposes and validates a concept evaluation metric in the design phases that meet these characteristics. To do this, 24 external designers and prosumers evaluate five products using this method. The results and conclusions contribute to the improvement of the method and provide information on how to approach it to the prosumers.

Engineering change management is a central part of the product development process. This paper investigates how variations from the PGE - Product Generation Engineering can improve the evaluation of engineering changes from the wiring harness. Engineering changes that occur in an automotive wiring harness development process are analysed in a case study, evaluated in expert interviews with regard to the risk and effort connected to the implementation and compared to the types of variations. Additional influencing factors are discussed. The variations provide an indication on risk and effort.

The evaluation of impact of collaborative research on robust design methodologies and methods is important to both academic and industry stakeholders. This paper introduces a framework for impact evaluation which combines the broader framework adopted for the academic research impact assessment with the organisation viewpoint centred on business results, process improvement and product development teams capability improvement. A large scale empirical study conducted with evidence from technical reports on workplace projects from an automotive OEM proved the validity of the proposed framework.

During product development, many decisions have to be made that affect the entire product life cycle and often lead to errors that cause additional effort. To proactively support the engineer in evaluating his design in a CAD program, in this paper an approach to evaluate milling designs using a multi-agent system (MAS) is presented. The CommonKADS method is used and the MAS is validated against an application example of a gearbox housing that has been checked for design guidelines, standards, and tool or machine portfolios.

Deep learning (DL) from various representations have succeeded in many fields. However, we know little about the machine learnability of distinct design representations when using DL to predict design performance. This paper proposes a graph representation for designs and compares it to the common image representation. We employ graph neural networks (GNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) respectively to learn them to predict drone performance. GCNs outperform CNNs by 2.6-8.1% in predictive validity. We argue that graph learning is a powerful and generalizable method for such tasks.

Engineers widely use topology optimization during the initial process of product development to obtain a first possible geometry design. The state-of-the-art method is iterative calculation, which requires both time and computational power. This paper proposes an AI-assisted design method for topology optimization, which does not require any optimized data. The presented AI-assisted design procedure generates geometries that are similar to those of conventional topology optimizers, but require only a fraction of the computational effort.

The paper investigates the relationship between the forms through which products are represented and the outcomes of evaluations made by observers. In particular, the study focuses on perceived affordances of creative designs, meant as the capability of capturing original elements and corresponding functions, for products presented through static images or videos. Also thanks to the use of Eye Tracking, the experimental results show how dynamic effects that involve salient aspects of products, as well as creative features, are critical to observers’ capability of capturing design intentions.

The use of product-service systems business models is increasing in today's economy. Because the products that provide the service to the customers incur cost during their lifetime, the method of lifecycle costing finds wide-spread use. However, this paper shows the current methods have some inaccuracies when determining lifecycle costs. The methods do not consider the required number of products necessary to provide the offered service to the customers. This paper describes a new framework for lifecycle costing that includes these cost components.

Requirements act as a limitation of the solution space, which represents the stakeholders’ needs and guides the whole product development process. Therefore, forgotten requirements can lead to wrong decisions when using them as a basis for decision-making. This contribution introduces a novel approach to link the requirement and evaluation criteria models to address this problem. For setting up those criteria consistently, the requirements are classified using natural language processing and derived by a ruleset based on a developed mapping between requirement classes and criteria types.

Eco-Design Strategies lead to both enhanced environmental sustainability and product differentiation, which, however, takes place only if observers recognize and value these advantages. To study this aspect, a sample of 40 product pictures has been administered to 12 subjects with experience in eco-design. They were asked to evaluate whether one or more Eco-Design Strategies (in Vezzoli and Manzini's version) were implemented in each depicted product. The outcome of the evaluation was an overall fair agreement. Useful information for eco-design is inferred from nuances of the results.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) require a high level of interaction between the driver and the system, depending on driving context at a particular moment. Context-aware ADAS evaluation based on vehicle data is the most prominent way to assess the complexity of ADAS interactions. In this study, we conducted interviews with the ADAS development team at Volvo Cars to understand the role of vehicle data in the ADAS development and evaluation. The interviews’ analysis reveals strategies for improvement of current practices for vehicle data-driven ADAS evaluation.

The belt units of an omnidirectional treadmill need to be connected for a continuous rotational transmission with variating axes angle. Torus gearing is not appropriate due to kinematic reasons, therefore a crown gearing with cone-shaped teeth is proposed. Parameter analysis on a virtual kinematics model show that depending on the cone angle, overlaps occur at different axis angles. Consequently, the shape of the teeth is modified with tip and foot relief and optimized so that no overlapping of the teeth occurs while a large path of contact is provided.

As the complexity of the systems increases, so does the complexity of designing a suitable engineering IT architecture. Challenges reach from the definition of required and consistent functionalities and interfaces to the evaluation, which combination of IT tools fulfils the required functionality, usability and interoperability in the best way. Thus, we provide a procedure, methodology and modelling support for the definition of functional and logical engineering IT architectures and their holistic evaluation. The approach is part of an overall procedure and demonstrated in an example.

When designing high performance sports equipment for Paralympic athletes, there are many unknowns for the design engineer to consider. The design challenge is an optimisation task per individual athlete. However, modelling this optimisation is difficult due to the many variables. This article presents the design of an experiment for identifying and evaluating various seating positions in Paralympic rowing by using a rowing ergometer with a modified seat. Results indicate that changing seating position has a substantial impact on per-athlete rowing performance.

This article poses the notion that it is possible and desirable to formalize and apply design critiques in a specialized framework. It describes GENCRIT, (GENeric CRItiquing Tool), one such framework for design critiquing. The article starts by highlighting the role of critics in the design process. It then goes on to bring out the need for a critic building tool, viz. that of aiding in the rapid development of multiple critics. GENCRIT combines knowledge-based techniques and a multifactor decision making model to develop an integrated approach to evaluation that encompasses a wide range of designs. Critics developed using GENCRIT evaluate candidate designs based on the critiquing knowledge provided by experts, give justifications for the evaluation, and suggest improvements. The working of GENCRIT is illustrated with two examples: a constructibility critic for reinforced concrete buildings and a bridge design critic.

This paper describes the development of models to simulate the process of Concept Design Evaluation. The models are an amalgam of a number of statistically based methods and approaches taken from the probability, reliability, and quality domains. They assume that designers use decomposition of design to undertake evaluation at design characteristic level with the total design evaluation being achieved, in some way, via recomposition. The models described in this paper attempt to describe how designers may perform recomposition and hence total design evaluation. It is argued that the ability to model this human activity is important for the future development of knowledge-based design tools.