Design occurs in complex socio-technical contexts with conflicting stakeholder goals, requirements and other constraints. These limit solution options and create trade-offs where improvements relative to one goal come at the expense of performance on another. Little is known about how the design context influences trade-offs, or how designers interact with context to manage trade-offs. This article reports on an exploratory qualitative interview study investigating design trade-offs in relation to their socio-technical context. We identified nine themes reflecting engineering designers’ perceptions of the influence of the design context on their ability to resolve trade-offs. Findings suggest that the design context is both a source of trade-offs, and of knowledge and information that helps designers clarify ambiguous requirements to navigate and resolve trade-offs. The results provide insight into how designers interact with the design context to learn about the structure of their design problems and the degrees of freedom available to resolve trade-offs. The findings also contribute to understanding the effects of path dependencies in trade-off situations, and how the sequential distribution of design decisions over time constrains trade-off resolution. We discuss some of the goals and challenges of conducting rigorous qualitative research in design and identify potential directions for further research.

To improve understanding of prototyping practice at the fuzzy front end of the design process, this article presents an analysis of a prototyping dataset captured during the IDEA challenge – a 4-day virtually hosted hackathon – using Pro2booth, a web-based prototype capture tool. The dataset comprised 203 prototypes created by four independent teams working in university labs across Europe supported by interviews carried out with each of the teams after the event. The results of the study provide nine key findings about prototyping at hackathons. These include elucidation of the purposes of prototypes in physical, digital and sketch domains and characterisation of teams’ prototyping practices and strategies. The most successful strategy focused on learning about the problem or solution space, often via physical prototypes rather than following more prescriptive ‘theoretical’ methodologies. Recommendations on prototyping strategies in hackathons or similar scenarios are provided, highlighting the importance of practical strategies that prioritise learning and adaptation. The results of this study raise the broader question to the wider research community of how design research and teaching should balance high-level strategic approaches with more hands-on ‘operational’ prototyping.

This article outlines a human-centered approach to developing digital patient stories, for sharing their experiences in health care, while preserving patient and others’ privacy. Employing a research-through-design approach, the study proposes a design solution using visualization and digital storytelling to document patients’ and families’ experiences and emotions, as well as their interactions with healthcare professionals in the postnatal unit. By transforming selected observational data into animated stories, this approach has the potential to elicit empathy, stimulate stakeholder engagement, and serve as a practical training tool for clinicians. This work was conducted as part of a broader study that aims to contribute to the existing knowledge base by advancing our understanding of stakeholder needs in birthing facilities and through postpartum discharge. This study primarily focuses on strategies for the development of digital stories and summarizes the factors that contributed to the production of digital stories within the context of sensitive data. It may serve as a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners interested in utilizing digital stories to encourage discussions, education and ultimately to enhance systems of health care for respect, equity and support.

Under the umbrella concepts of upscaling and emerging technology, a wide variety of phenomena related to technology development and deployment in society are examined to meet societal imperatives (e.g., environment, safety, social justice). The design literature does not provide an explicit common theoretical and practical framework to clarify the assessment method to handle “an” upscaling. In this nebulous context, designers are struggling to identify the characteristics to anticipate the consequences of emerging technology upscaling. This article therefore first proposes a structuring framework to analyze the literature in a wide range of industrial sectors (energy, chemistry, building, etc.). This characterization brought to light five prevalent archetypes clarifying the concepts of upscaling and emerging technology. Then, a synthesis of invariants and methodological requirements for designers is proposed to deal with upscaling assessment according to each archetype, based on a literature review of existing design methods. This literature review process showed a disparity in treatment for some archetypes, regarding the industrial sector. A discussion is consequently proposed in the conclusion to guide design practices.

This article presents a domain-specific language for writing highly structured multilevel system specifications. The language effectively bridges the gap between requirements engineering and systems architecting by enabling the direct derivation of a dependency graph from the system specifications. The dependency graph allows for the easy manipulation, visualization and analysis of the system architecture, ensuring the consistency among written system specifications and visual system architecture models. The system architecture models provide direct feedback on the completeness of the system specifications. The language and associated tooling has been made publicly available and has been applied in several industrial case studies. In this article, the fundamental concepts and way of working of the language are explained using an illustrative example.

Freehand sketching meets a vital need in design for fluid, fast and flexible visual representations that designers build off of and learn from. Sketching more frequently during the design process correlates with positive design outcomes. Engineering designers receive minimal training on freehand sketching, and engineering students do not apply freehand sketching well during the design process. This study examines some of the underlying factors associated with using sketching more frequently. We examine how sketching skills, spatial visualization skills, sketching instruction and engineering design self-efficacy influence designers’ self-reported sketching behavior. We find that higher sketching skills are associated with using sketching in a variety of ways, and spatial visualization skills and design self-efficacy are associated with sketching more frequently. The relationships uncovered were emphasized by their longevity: spatial skills and sketching skills in students’ first semesters predicted sketching more frequently in a senior capstone design course. These long-lasting relationships suggest the need to invest in students’ spatial skills and sketching skills early in the degree program so that they can be leveraged for better design practice.

The evolutionary development of advanced systems (AS) leads to a necessary rethinking of how they can be supported methodically and in terms of processes in product development. Advanced systems engineering (ASE) offers a novel and holistically adaptive approach to facing such challenges in a structured way. However, many of the ASE use cases relate to the development of systems as products, product networks or individual projects. The additional consideration of entire modular product families within AS offers a further decisive advantage for companies, organisations and the people in ASE. By considering modular product families along the entire life cycle in a product family engineering (PFE), the approaches of ASE can bring their impact and potential to additional system levels occurring when considering product families. The systems, which become complex through variety and collaboration, are broken down into their system elements in a structured way and prepared for a common interdisciplinary understanding, as conveyed by ASE. In this paper, the PFE is presented in excerpts using examples of various aspects and points in time of the product’s life as a complementary approach for ASE.

First-of-a-kind engineered systems often burst with complexity – a major cause of project budget and time overruns. Our particular concern is the structural complexity of nuclear fusion devices, which is determined by the amount and entanglement of components. We seek to understand how this complexity rises during the development phase and how to manage it. This paper formulates a theory around the interplay between a problem-solving design process and an evolving design model. The design process introduces new elements that solve problems but also increase the quantifiable complexity of the model. Those elements may lead to new problems, extending the design process. We capture these causal effects in a hierarchy of problems and introduce two metrics of the impact of design decisions on complexity. By combining and incorporating the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) paradigm, we create a new problem-solving method. This method frames formulation, synthesis and analysis activities as transitions from problems to solutions. We demonstrate our method for a nuclear fusion measurement system. Exploring different design trajectories leads to alternative design models with varying degrees of complexity. Furthermore, we visualize the time-evolution of complexity during the design process. Analysis of individual design decisions emphasizes the high impact of early design decisions on the final system complexity.

Mixed Reality enables individuals to visualise and interact with artefacts and environments through a combination of physical and virtual assets. It has received increased interest from the design community as a means to accelerate, enrich and enhance prototyping activities. This article concerns MR’s ability to deceive an individual through the combination of virtual and physical assets and their underlying traits (e.g., mass, size), and a user’s cognitive ability to ‘join the dots’. If properly implemented, MR could save time and resources by reducing the required prototype fidelity and the need to fully realise variants. However, there is a gap in understanding how the traits of physical and virtual assets and cognition combine to form reality. This article presents a study investigated the role mass, virtual and physical model size played on users perception of an MR prototype. The relative impact of these factors was determined by varying these parameters and assessing the user’s perceived change. The key finding from this study was that the virtual model size had a far greater influence on prototype perceived by the user. This suggests that the required physical fidelity of an MR prototype can be lower than the virtual. Furthermore, exploring size design variants can be achieved exclusively through changes to the virtual model.

By making building instructions freely accessible to everyone, open-source machine tools (OSMTs) promise to democratize manufacturing by enabling users in marginalized settings to build machines tools by themselves. There is, however, a lack of empirical evidence of the replicability of OSMT designs in low-resource contexts. This article explores OSMT replicability through qualitative and empirical methods to answer the central research question: Are designs that are fully open source also globally replicable? A comparative experiment was carried out by replicating an open-source 3D printer in two different locations: in Germany (resource-rich) and in Oman (resource-poor). The experiment aimed to determine the barriers faced with the replication in each location. It was significantly more challenging to replicate the 3D printer in Oman, primarily due to difficulties in sourcing and manufacturing, necessitating extensive modifications, which demanded greater skills and dexterity from users compared to those in Germany. Qualitative interviews found that limited digital literacy posed a significant barrier for microenterprise owners in replicating OSMT. Finally, design guidelines were proposed to enhance the global replicability of contextualized OSMT designs.

The reorientation to remote teaching due to the impact of COVID-19 restrictions proved to be both challenging and compromising, particularly in the context of delivering practice-based design education. Central to the challenges faced by many design tutors was the loss of the design studio as a focal point for engagement and learning. However, delivering teaching remotely through a period of enforced separation also proved that through adversity comes new insights, with the accelerated use of emergent technologies to support distributed working revealing new behaviours and opportunities for learning to take place. In response to COVID-19 restrictions, Miro, the digital whiteboard platform was widely adopted within the UK creative industries and universities alike to facilitate remote engagement. Following a return to campus-based delivery through the Autumn/Fall of 2021, it became evident that some of the pragmatic approaches adopted through necessity had the potential to hold lasting value beyond crisis modes of teaching. This position paper presents a series of reflective studies gathered over three academic years with the aim of (1) understanding the impacts of remote learning as experienced by design students (2) establish clear benefits for the application of online platforms within a blended campus-based delivery and (3) identify emergent characteristics in students’ navigation of the post-COVID design studio.

Evaluating the algorithmic behavior of interactive systems is complex and time-consuming. Developers increasingly recognize the importance of accountability for their algorithmic creations’ unanticipated behavior and resulting implications. To mitigate this phenomenon, developers not only need to concentrate on the observable inaccuracies that can be measured quantitatively but also the more subjective outcomes that can perpetuate social bias, which are challenging to identify. We require a new approach that involves humans in scrutinizing algorithmic behavior. It leverages a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to support an ethical, value-aligned design and a system’s lifecycle, informed by users’ perception and values. To date, the literature lacks an agreed-upon framework for such an approach. Consequently, we propose an oversight framework, Modular Oversight Methodology (MOM), which aids developers in assessing the behavior of their systems by involving a carefully crowdsourced society-in-the-loop. The framework facilitates the development and execution of an oversight process and can be tweaked according to the domain and application of use. Through such an oversight process, developers can assess the human perception of the algorithmic behavior under inspection, and extract valuable insights that will aid in assessing its implications. We present the MOM framework, as a first step toward tailoring more robust, domain-specific solutions to exercise human oversight over algorithms, as a means for software developers to keep the generated output of their solutions fair and trustworthy.

Testing prototypes with users is essential when developing new products. This qualitative study examines and organizes users’ (children) feedback on physical toy prototypes at various fidelity levels; the data collected comes from a multidisciplinary design studio class tasked with developing wooden toys for the company PlanToys. In this research, we use an organizational framework to categorize stakeholders’ feedback, which includes affirmative feedback, convergent critical feedback, and divergent critical feedback. In our analysis, the children’s feedback was compared by prototype fidelity in terms of both form and function, as well as by the feedback categorization. Findings suggest that form fidelity may bias children toward giving more divergent feedback, that function fidelity may have little impact on feedback given, that children tend to give more types of feedback on lower fidelity than higher fidelity models, and that play value, form, interaction, and function were the highest reported categories of feedback. Based on our observations, we encourage toy designers to be aware of their goals for testing with children before beginning to prototype. This paper is a resource for designers to understand how to prototype for children, as well as resource for researchers studying how specific end users influence the product design process.

Universities face a critical crossroads, in need of swift, targeted, and efficient actions to address future challenges. This necessities a strategic approach to updating and assessing engineering design education. Efforts to improve teaching and learning require systematic change in many universities, yet research on structuring such change is scarce. Few studies have combined a systems perspective with a functional operational level. This research embeds design thinking to structure to isolated actions. Drawing from an extensive literature review of educational change frameworks and several illustrative cases, this article demonstrates the potential of design-driven change. It highlights how dynamic interrelations can facilitate educational transformations across diverse academic levels. By presenting an educational ecosystem as a framework for systematic educational change, design thinking functions as a catalyst for educational transformation. The article also presents case findings that strengthen supportive actions ingrained in existing change research frameworks connecting, them to a transparent approach for sustainable and careful decision-making.

Product engineering in general and advanced systems engineering in specific are highly complex and unique processes that strive to deliver innovations – successful new products. To reduce risk and time, product engineers refer to existing (socio-)technical systems or subsystems. These references are part of the reference system. A great variety of elements can be used as reference system elements in engineering projects, but the different types of reference system elements and their roles are not yet characterized. However, this is a necessary prerequisite to model and conduct product generation engineering effectively. Here, we show how reference system elements can be categorized into three types that differ regarding their intended application in the actual engineering project. Therefore, we introduce three subsystems: reference system of objectives, reference operation system, and reference system of objects. Furthermore, we provide definitions for all subsystems to specify the allocation. We believe these results will form the basis for a continuous description and continuous engineering of consecutive and parallel product generations based on model-based systems engineering. Furthermore, the results will be the starting point for the development of design supports to assist engineers in designing their specific reference systems and to make the reference system part of efficient engineering processes.

Incorporating contextual factors into engineering design processes is recommended to develop solutions that function appropriately in their intended use contexts. In global health settings, failing to tailor solutions to their broader context has led to many product failures. Since prior work has thus far not investigated the use of contextual factors in global health design practice, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 experienced global health design practitioners. Our analysis identified 351 instances of participants incorporating contextual factors in their previous design experiences, which we categorized into a taxonomy of contextual factors, including 9 primary and 32 secondary classifications. We summarized and synthesized key patterns within all the identified contextual factor categories. Next, this study presents a descriptive model for incorporating contextual factors developed from our findings, which identifies that participants actively sought contextual information and made conscious decisions to adjust their solutions, target markets and implementation plans to accommodate contextual factors iteratively throughout their design processes. Our findings highlight how participants sometimes conducted formal evaluations while other times they relied on their own experience, the experience of a team member or other stakeholder engagement strategies. The research findings can ultimately inform design practice and engineering pedagogy for global health applications.

Project-based learning (PBL) has gained widespread acceptance as a cutting-edge teaching approach in universities, particularly for imparting engineering design skills. PBL allows students to showcase their design skills and put into practice the theoretical concepts acquired through instruction. Throughout the various phases of the design process and project execution, students prepare design artifacts, which serve as tangible indicators of their design skills – an essential competency for engineers. The objective of this research is to evaluate and compare the application of engineering design skills among first-year and third-year engineering students as evidenced by their design artifacts. This comparative analysis aims to pinpoint areas of strength and opportunities for growth, thereby offering a holistic view of student development in design proficiency throughout their undergraduate education. Employing a standardized rubric to evaluate these artifacts allows for an unbiased assessment of the students’ design process acumen. The findings offer insights into the design skill proficiency of two student groups at different points in the design process. It is imperative for engineering educators to strategically highlight every aspect of the design process within PBL, ensuring the comprehensive development of design competencies.

Evaluation approaches are needed to ensure the development of effective design support. These approaches help developers ensure that their design support possesses the general design support characteristics necessary to enable designers to achieve their desired outcomes. Consequently, evaluating design support based on these characteristics ensures that the design support fulfils its intended purpose.

This work reviews design support definitions and identifies and describes 11 design support characteristics. The characteristics are applied to evaluate a proposed design support that uses additive manufacturing (AM) design artefacts (AMDAs) to explore design uncertainties. Product-specific design artefacts were designed and tested to investigate buildability limits and the relationship between surface roughness and fatigue performance of a design feature in a space industry component. The AMDA approach aided the investigation of design uncertainties, identified design solution constraints, and uncovered previously unknown uncertainties. However, the results provided by product-specific artefacts depend on how well the user frames their problem and understands their AM process and product. Hence, iterations can be required. Based on the evaluation of the AMDA process, setting test evaluation criteria is recommended, and the AMDA method is proposed.

Loneliness and social isolation are prevalent concerns among older adults and can lead to negative health consequences and a reduced lifespan. New technologies are increasingly being developed to help address loneliness and social isolation in older adults, including monitoring systems, social networks, robots, companions, smart televisions, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. This systematic review maps human-centered design (HCD) and user-centered design (UCD) approaches, human needs, and contextual factors considered in current technological interventions designed to address the problems of loneliness and social isolation in older adults. We conducted a scoping review and in-depth examination of 98 papers through a qualitative content analysis. We found 12 studies applying either an HCD or UCD approach and observed strengths in continuous user involvement and implementation in field studies but limitations in participant inclusion criteria and methodological reporting. We also observed the consideration of important human needs and contextual factors. However, more research is needed on stakeholder perspectives, the functioning of applications in different housing environments, as well as studies that include diverse socio-economic groups.

Self-instructional media in education has the potential to address educational challenges such as accessibility, flexible and personalised learning, real-time assessment and resource efficiency. The objectives of this study are to (1) develop programmed instructions to teach design thinking concepts and (2) investigate its effects on secondary school students’ understanding of these concepts. A design thinking workshop was conducted with secondary school students; subsequently, their understanding of design thinking concepts gained through digital programmed instructions was evaluated. The study involved 33 novice secondary school students from grades 6 to 9 in India, who worked in teams to find and solve real-life, open-ended, complex problems during the workshop using the design thinking process. Data on (i) the individual performance in understanding design thinking concepts and (ii) team performance in design problem finding and solving were collected using individual tests and teams’ outcome evaluations, respectively. Students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the programmed instructions for supporting understanding of the concepts were also captured. Results show the positive effects on students’ understanding of design thinking concepts as well as on their problem-finding and solving skills. The results justify the use of programmed instructions in secondary school curricula to advance design thinking concepts. The current version of programmed instruction has limitations, including the absence of branching mechanisms, a detailed feedback system, multimodal content and backend functionalities. Future work will aim to address these issues and overcome these shortcomings.