Human-centered design provides a means to help designers create products or systems with ‘people’ as the focus. Compassionate Design (CD), introduced in this paper, is an approach that addresses niche sensitive needs and involves a way of thinking where designers pay special attention to the users’ sense of dignity, empowerment, and security. These niche needs surfaced as a result of analyses of 12 cases situated in sensitive contexts where the users felt vulnerable, had a high level of emotional engagement and were negatively affected by the situation. The designers described their deep concern for the users in various talks and interviews. This paper explains the conception of CD and its development that resulted from iteratively and qualitatively analyzing these cases in which designers were intuitively focusing on niche user needs. Dignity, empowerment and security form the basis of CD and have been contextualized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs after they emerged as a result of the analysis of data. This research sets the platform for a design approach that can help designers to consider the often unarticulated user needs of dignity, empowerment and security, in a more intentional manner and not be left to chance.

Design fixation refers to blind adherence to a set of ideas, which can limit the output of conceptual design. Engineering designers tend to fixate on features of pre-existing solutions and consequently generate designs with similar features. The objective of this study is to leverage functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of engineering designers during conceptual design in order to understand whether/where design fixation can be detected in a person’s brain when solving design problems. Design solutions indicated that fixation effects were detectable at a statistically significant level. fMRI results show increased activation in areas associated with visuospatial processing when comparing ideation activities using an Example solution to No Example solution. Activation was found in the right inferior temporal gyrus, left middle occipital gyrus, and right superior parietal lobule regions. The left lingual and superior frontal gyri were found to be less active in the example condition; these gyri are close in proximity to the prefrontal cortex, associated with creative output. The spatial patterns of activation provide evidence that a shift in mental resources can occur when a designer becomes fixated. For designers, the timing of ideation relative to the timing of benchmarking existing solutions should be considered.

This paper presents an exercise on theory building to characterise design ideation. It starts by examining how early ideas are defined and evaluated in the literature. An essentialist view is identified that explains the creativity of a final design solution by the creative qualities of early ideas attributed by external judges. Criteria for a theory of ideation that does not rely on the primacy of essence are enumerated. Advanced professional practice is examined to understand evaluation of early ideas ‘in the wild’. Accretion is then introduced as an analogical model to imaginatively drive definitions and conjectures about idea formation in the co-evolution of problem and design spaces. Vignettes from ideation episodes are used to illustrate an accretion theory of ideation. An accretion theory supports new ways to think about ideation as a complex formation process where creative solutions emerge from the synthesis of a multitude of fragmentary and partial ideas – or ‘ideasimals’. An accretion theory of ideation helps to explain the creative value of a final design solution without relying on early ideas having a creative essence, because the creativity of a solution is viewed as emergent rather than present in early versions. An accretion lens is used to suggest new ideation metrics to study the qualities of idea fragments and the process of idea formation. Definitions and relevant assessment regimes for different stages of ideation are discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion on entailments of an accretion theory and next steps for this theory building enterprise.

Engineered system architectures leveraging collaboration among multiple actors across organizational boundaries are envisioned to be more flexible, robust, or efficient than independent alternatives but also carry significant downside risks from new interdependencies added between constituents. This paper transitions the concept of risk dominance from equilibrium selection in game theory to engineering design as a strategic measure of collective stability for system of systems. A proposed method characterizes system design as a bi-level problem with two or more asymmetric decision-makers. A measure of risk dominance assesses strategic dynamics with respect to the stability of joint or collaborative architectures relative to independent alternatives using a novel linearization technique to approximate linear incentives among actors. An illustrative example case for an asymmetric three-player design scenario shows how strategic risk dominance can identify and mitigate architectures with unstable risk-reward dynamics.

Despite the potential to lead to enhanced environmental performance, the extent to which eco-design leads to success is still unclear. In order to lay bare the effects of eco-design implementation, this paper focuses on understanding the correlations between specific eco-design principles and success through an exploratory study. A sample of 178 products, characterized in terms of their success levels and implemented eco-design principles, was statistically analyzed. The results indicate a number of positive correlations for principles that tend to favor success (e.g. intensified use and product/service systems) and negative correlations for principles that tend to moderate the chances of success (e.g. minimize packaging). Although the mechanisms that cause this phenomenon should be further investigated, the findings can provide designers with additional recommendations for the selection of eco-design principles.

Talking about design, most discussions circulate around physical objects or products, around their invention, development, production and marketing. While most modern design approaches do also cover questions pertaining to human interaction, e.g. within user- or human-centred design philosophies, a systematic and fundamental conception of the role and implications that human perception and emo-cognitive processing take with regard to designing physical goods is lacking. Under the umbrella term ‘Psychology of Design’, I will develop and elaborate on psychological dimensions that are highly relevant to the optimization and evaluation of design. I propagate a general psychological turn in design theory and practice in order to purposefully include not only the top-down processes triggered by context, framing, expectation, knowledge or habituation but also the psychological effects of Gestalt and Zeitgeist. Such psychological effects have the potential to determine whether the very same physical design will be aesthetically appreciated, desired, loved or rejected in the end. Psychology of design has a tremendous influence on the success and sustainability of design by triggering associations and displaying demand characteristics in a multimodal way. The paper is based on fundamental psychological theories and empirical evidences which are linked to applied examples from the world of art and design.

The development of hybrid trusses made of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic struts and aluminum knots is currently not standardized, and there is no overall method for the design, although it has been proven that mass reduction is feasible. This paper introduces a new method for computer-aided engineering based design of hybrid trusses using carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic struts and metal nodes based on a modular system. The method includes all design steps from topology optimization to computer-aided design model generation and offers support to the engineer. The method is discussed in theory. A case study is done with a beam-shaped truss. It shows that if the bisection optimization method is combined with further constraints, it is suitable for selecting the optimum struts from a modular system for the truss. The developed approach is a suitable method for designing hybrid trusses. The basis of the method has been developed and will be further detailed and extended.

Design structure matrices (DSMs) are widely known for their ability to support engineers in the management of dependencies across product and organisational architectures. Recent work in the field has exploited product lifecycle management systems to generate DSMs via the co-occurrence of edits to engineering files. These are referred to as dynamic DSMs and results have demonstrated both the efficacy and accuracy of dynamic DSMs in representing engineering work and emergent product architectures. The wide-ranging applicability of the theoretical model and associated analytical process to generate dynamic DSMs enables investigations into the evolving structures within digital engineering work. This paper uses this new capability and presents the results of the world’s first comparison of dynamic DSMs from a set of near-identical systems design projects. Through comparison of the dynamic DSMs’ end-of-project state, change propagation characteristics and evolutionary behaviour, 10 emergent structures are elicited. These emergent structures are considered in the context of team performance and design intent in order to explain and code the identified structures. The significance of these structures for the management of future systems design projects in terms of productivity and efficacy is also described.

In product design engineering (PDE), ideation involves the generation of technical behaviours and physical structures to address specific functional requirements. This differs from generic creative ideation tasks, which emphasise functional and technical considerations less. To advance knowledge about the neural basis of PDE ideation, we present the first fMRI study on professional product design engineers practising in industry. We aimed to explore brain activation during ideation, and compare activation in open-ended and constrained tasks. Imagery manipulation tasks were contrasted with ideation tasks in a sample of 29 PDE professionals. The key findings were: (1) PDE ideation is associated with greater activity in left cingulate gyrus; (2) there were no significant differences between open-ended and constrained tasks; and (3) a preliminary association with activity in the right superior temporal gyrus was also observed. The results are consistent with existing fMRI work on generic creative ideation, suggesting that PDE ideation may share a number of similarities at the neural level. Future work includes: functional connectivity analysis of open-ended and constrained ideation to further investigate potential differences; investigating the effects of aspects of design expertise/training on processing; and the use of novelty measures directly linked to the designer’s internal processing in fMRI analysis.