In industry, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is an established quality tool for minimizing development risks in systems, products and processes. Nevertheless, the presented use case shows that the application of the FMEA method in the development of Product-Service Systems in a SME requires modifications to ensure that the special character of PSS is appropriately included and that risks can be adequately assessed and prioritized.

Textual idea data from online crowdsourcing contains rich information of the concepts that underlie the original ideas and can be recombined to generate new ideas. But representing such information in a way that can stimulate new ideas is not a trivial task, because crowdsourced data are often vast and in unstructured natural languages. This paper introduces a method that uses natural language processing to summarize a massive number of idea descriptions and represents the underlying concept space as word clouds with a core-periphery structure to inspire recombinations of such concepts into new ideas. We report the use of this method in a real public-sector-sponsored project to explore ideas for future transportation system design. Word clouds that represent the concept space underlying original crowdsourced ideas are used as ideation aids and stimulate many new ideas with varied novelty, usefulness and feasibility. The new ideas suggest that the proposed method helps expand the idea space. Our analysis of these ideas and a survey with the designers who generated them shed light on how people perceive and use the word clouds as ideation aids and suggest future research directions.

The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to activate spontaneous and immediate users’ reactions are considered the outcome of good design practice.

A huge effort has been made by researchers for understanding affordances: yet these efforts have been somewhat elusive. In particular, they have been limited to case studies and experimental studies, usually involving a small subset of affordances. No systematic effort has been carried out to list all known affordance effects. This paper offers preliminary steps for such an ambitious effort.

We propose a set of three different approaches of Natural Language Processing techniques to be used to extract meaningful affordance information from the full text of patents: 1) a simple word search, 2) a lexicon of affordances and 3) a rule-based system.

The results give in-depth measures of how rare affordances in patents are, and a fine grain analysis of the linguistical construction of affordances. Finally, we show an interesting output of our method, that has detected affordances for disabled people, showing the ability of our system to automatically collect design-relevant knowledge.

Academics and practitioners have shown a growing interest in automobile reverse supply chain (RSC) management as a result of the rise of circular economy and the development of Industry 4.0. Accurate quantity prediction enhances the efficiency of all decision levels in automobile RSC, not only the recovery of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs). Therefore, a comprehensive state-of-the-art review, evaluating ELVs quantity forecasting methodologies and summarizing the main variables influencing forecasting outcomes, is conducted to throw shed light on future research directions.

Product Service Systems (PSS) are increasingly important for companies. They enable a multitude of advantages, including the ability to offer customers even more individual customised solutions. However, PSS can also cause negative effects for companies. For example, PSS increase the complexity within companies. In order to cope with this complexity, the modularisation of PSS is frequently suggested in literature. However, existing approaches for modularisation only consider functional reasons for module composition and neglect the product-strategic aspects. This paper introduces a new approach for the modularisation of PSS, which combines functional and product-strategic aspects into one approach. To achieve this, a separate modular structure is developed for each life phase. Following this, these are harmonised across all life phases. This enables the advantages of the modular PSS structure to be used in all life phases. A PSS family of laser processing machines is used to illustrate the new developed approach.

Various factors influence mental well-being, and span individual, social and familial levels. These factors are connected in many ways, forming a complex web of factors and providing pathways for developing programs to improve well-being and for further research. These factors can be studied individually using traditional methods and mapped together to be analyzed holistically from a complex system perspective. This study provides a novel approach using PageRank and social network analysis to understand such maps. The motives are: (1) to realize the most influential factors in such complex networks, (2) to understand factors that influence variations from different network aspects. A previously developed map for children's mental well-being was adopted to evaluate the approach. To achieve our motives, we have developed an approach using PageRank and Social Network Analysis. The results indicate that regardless of the network scale, two key factors called "Quantity and Quality of Relationships" and "Advocacy" can influence children's mental well-being significantly. Moreover, the divergence analysis reveals that one factor, "Recognition/Value Placed on well-being at School" causes a wide range of diffusion throughout the system.

This article aims to contribute to the knowledge on product/service system (PSS) design practice as follows. First, a new rationale for why PSS design in practice often does not exploit its full potential is given based on a theory on inseparability of services. Second, a representation of the dependencies between product design parameters (DPs) and service DPs in a form of potential-dependency knowledge base is proposed as a remedy. Third, reusability of the knowledge captured from product-service integration across sectorial borders is shown with PSS design at a complex product manufacturer.

The context of product development can be understood as transformation of needs into technical solutions under the continuous handling of uncertainties. These result particularly in early development phases from a lack of technical knowledge. In order to counter the uncertainties, companies are increasingly implementing agile approaches, which mostly originate in the area of software development. Although these are suitable for flexible handling of project management activities and lead to an increased reactivity of the development team, they do not address the early and continuous integration of technical knowledge into the process. With the aim of optimizing mechatronic systems with regard to their lightweight design potentials, in this article a method is developed that supports agile development with the goal of lightweight design. Therefore, it combines a method for functional modelling with a function-based lightweight design method. The targeted integration of technical knowledge has shown that lightweight design potentials can be optimized iteratively in agile approaches. As an initial validation, the applicability of the method was demonstrated in a development project.

Prototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

Design method validation is an important research activity in method development. But the design method's applicability is often left out in validation, although it is a necessary step and it enables further validation steps. Currently, there is a lack of support for the assessment of design method applicability. We present an approach to provide support for iterative studies on three aspects of design method applicability. We evaluate the approach in a single case study. In the study, we investigate the applicability of a method for model building in analysis, in three iterative steps of the approach. Application of the approach produced valuable insights on the method applicability. The results show how aspects of applicability can be assessed using the presented approach. Therefore, the approach can contribute to the standardisation of design method validation, especially for early stages of validation, which is currently discussed in the community.

With the rapid development of digital technologies, products connectivity is increasing as well as the data produced and collected. Forecasts on product development predict that this trend will keep on growing. In this context, new design solutions based on data are emerging. Those data-driven design approaches are common for identifying the customers' need when developing a new product. However, few studies cover data-driven design in the other early stages of product design. Thus, the research question addressed in this paper is: what are the challenges of data-driven design research in the early phases of the product development process? Through a literature review and a workshop proposed at the conference DESIGN 2020, this paper offers a first glimpse of future research leads. A list of 5 challenges for data-driven design in the early stages of product design is proposed and ranked from short term to long term.

The paper explores the differences between immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) during design reviews. Based on ten reviews with one designer and two reviewers, the study shows that CVEs affect verbal communication structure. More specifically, teams usually talked less, and reviewers exchanged significantly more turn sequences in immersive than in non-immersive CVEs. Regardless of the environment, most turn sequences were related to the designer, who usually talked the most. These findings contribute to the understanding of CVEs in virtual teams.

Since decades, researchers are developing methods, tools, and processes for the development of mechatronic systems. In the last decade, this field has widened, including, amongst others, aspects such as cyber-physical systems (CPS) or the internet of things (IoT). Still, little concrete guidance can be identified for engineers who have to decide whether to realize a certain product function mechanically, electronically, through software functions, or with combinations thereof. The goal of the paper is to contribute to the development of guidelines for design engineers in which domain (or in which combination of domains and other areas) to allocate the solution for an engineering problem.

Resilient systems have the capability to survive and recover from seriously affecting events. Resilience engineering already is established for socio-economic organisations and extended network-like structures e. g. supply systems like power grids. Transferring the known principles and concepts used in these disciplines enables engineering resilient load-carrying systems and subsystems, too. Unexpected load conditions or component damages are summarised as disruptions caused by nesciense that may cause damages to the system or even system breakdowns. Disruptions caused by nescience can be controlled by analysing the resilience characteristics and synthesising resilient load-carrying systems. This paper contributes to a development methodology for resilient load-carrying systems by presenting a resilience applications model to support engineers analysing system resilience characteristics and behaviour. Further a concept of a systematically structured solution catalogue is provided that can be used for the classification of measures to realise resilience functions depending on system adaptivity and disruption progress. The resilience characteristics are illustrated by 3 examples.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) constitutes an important tool for industrial designers. Similarly, Virtual Reality (VR) has the capability to revolutionize how designers work with its increased sense of scale and perspective. However, existing VR CAD applications are limited in terms of functionality and intuitive control. Based on a comparison of VR CAD applications, ImPro, a new application for immersive prototyping for industrial designers was developed. The user evaluations and comparisons show that ImPro offers increased usability, functionality, and suitability for industrial designers.

In “Grande cuisine” creation and tradition co-evolve in a rich number of ways. Great chefs still use recipes from the 19th century and may also reinvent gastronomy itself. The creation heritage of culinary Art is the paradoxical capacity to both “respect” tradition and “break” its rules. Building on C-K theory, we show that such creative heritage needs multiple and independent layers of knowledge that “speak” of basic fixed objects. These properties correspond to general mathematical structures that we find in Topos theory. Thus, C-K/Topos predicts creative design strategies that can respect tradition in different ways. It also proves a form of “innovation within tradition” - “sheafification” in Topos words- that is not a compromise and builds on tradition itself. These findings fit with the lessons of great books of gastronomy. C-K/Topos has a wide scope of validity: it applies to any innovative design that needs preserving systemic structures, like engineering systems or social and environmental systems. C- K/Topos models with a high generality how local and radical innovation can warrant systems incremental change. C-K/Topos will have implications for teaching and research.

Science and technology generated by Universities has many challenges in reaching commercial product applications, as has been explored in a range of literature. Product design has been identified to add value through various types of contributions in addressing these challenges; however, there remains a gap in literature to explore how and when product development activities can practically be applied to technology development.

This paper furthers the idea that the product development process can help bridge the gap between the laboratory and commercial applications by proposing a framework for how Ulrich and Eppinger's product development process can integrate with the STAM technology development model. This is a significant step towards understanding how in practice these disciplines can work together to bring science and technology from the laboratory to products in the marketplace.

The use of flexible and autonomous robotics systems is the solution for the automation task of the production and intra-logistics environments. This dynamic context requires the robot to be aware of its surroundings through the whole task, also after accomplishing the gripping action. We present an anomaly detection approach based on unsupervised learning and reconstruction fidelity of image data. We design our method to enhance the dynamic environment perception of robotics systems and apply it in a palletizing robot, in order to perceive and detect changes to its surrounding and process after the gripping step. Our proposed approach achieves the performance targeted by the considered industrial requirements.

Start-ups tend to form with a central idea that differentiates them from their competitors in the market. It is crucial for them to efficiently transform the idea into a marketable product. Prototyping helps to iteratively achieve a minimum viable product and plays a crucial role by enabling teams to test their ideas with limited resources early on. However, the prototyping process may have wrong focus leading to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Previously, we proposed role-based prototyping for fuzzy front-end development in small teams. It supports (1) resource allocation, (2) the definition of responsibilities, and (3) structuring the development process with milestones. In recent research this was a promising yet incomplete approach. We extend the previous work by refining the prototyping process by adding a prototyping matrix with two dimensions (purpose and lens), a prototyping cycle (plan, execute, test, reflect, assimilate), and a modified Kanban board (Protoban) for planning, managing, and reflecting cycles. This process, named PETRA was tested with a start-up developing an autonomous trash picking robot. The extended approach supported the team significantly in providing a clear idea of what to do at what time.

Mass-personalization (MP) presents an opportunity to meet diversifying customer needs in consumer products market with a near mass-production efficiency. Traditional product development methodologies fall short to guide design for MP and a dedicated systematic methodology is essential. The proposed approach bases on a dynamic product template that automatically adapts with user input and produces a reliable output. This paper presents the workflow towards mass-personalization of saxophone mouthpieces with focus on design automation.