This paper demonstrates the importance of individual work in collaborative design meetings based on Granger’ causality and discusses how this impacts design tools and methodologies.

Based on Tucker's et al. CIAO model of globally collaborative work which allows distinguishing the main modes of interaction during a meeting, our research identifies the patterns or sequences of those interaction modes according to the Granger causality concept. Granger causality makes it possible to identify a temporal precedence of events without necessarily implying causality.

The results show that individual work plays a key role in achieving collaborative work. However, other factors such as the nature of the meetings and the objectives pursued also influence the sequences of interaction of the different modes.

These first results allow making recommendations on collaborative work methodologies and support mechanisms for collaboration. For instance, the ability of digital devices to facilitate the simultaneous individual work of participants in a collective space is a key factor and the ability to preserve sequences for individual work during a design meeting should be monitored to keep global efficiency.

Designers use their tacit knowledge to estimate project design effort needs, which can be enhanced through the understanding of the factors that most influence those needs. Evaluating and assessing project briefs against these factors can assist designers when planning their projects. The Collaborative Project Brief Scorecard (CPDS) Method identifies those factors and produces a scorecard for designers to evaluate project briefs based on these factors and allows for project comparisons, aids in past project recall and provides a focal point for collaborative reflection on design activities.

During engineering design, designers employ three types of model: physical, virtual and cognitive. The role and contribution of each is documented in literature albeit fragmented in nature. Consequentially, a gap in understanding exists in terms of how these models and the transitions between them impact the designer and design process. This paper begins to address this through a characterisation of each model class and an appraisal of the transitional pathways including their alignment to seminal design frameworks.

Prototyping is a well-established and valued design process activity. However, capturing prototypes and the tacit knowledge that led to and was gained from their creation is a challenge. Beyond that, questions remain on how best to utilise that captured data. This paper looks at how one can exploit and generate insights from data that has been captured, specifically looking at graph databases, the network analysis techniques they permit and the differing fidelities of visualisation and interactivity that they enable.

The climate change and the new regulations imposed to slow down this process have pushed major actors around the world to apply sustainable measures in order to meet governmental obligations. The packaging industry has a major role in fighting climate change and the environmental social and financial disasters. In fact, packaging requires substantial number of natural resources and is often disposed of in ways that harm the environment. Supply chain managers realized that packaging design is the root to solve all the problems packages create throughout their entire life cycle. Therefore, a thorough study about influencing the design process should be prioritized. This paper provides a systematic review of industrial packaging eco-design applied to the supply chain. It aims to conceptualize the definition of industrial packaging eco-design and supply chain sustainability to categorize main parameters to its implementation and to identify the limitations of current research and its prospects.

The work introduced two novel multiscale multifunctional tire designs developed using the Domain Integrated Design (DID) method and modelled with the LatticeQuery geometric modelling software. Furthermore, this research validates the meta-level parameter “interaction area” proposed for selecting biological analogy in the DID method. These two use cases were simulated with Abaqus. The concepts covered in this work are an example of multi-functional design. The obtained results validate the meta-level parameter derived from the DID methodology.

Resilience is a widely studied concept that is a key objective in the design and development of sustainable systems. This is especially true for the agricultural systems critical to food production, economic viability, and sustainability of our communities, as farmers seek to meet increasing demand in the face of shocks such as climate change and natural disasters. Although there is a rich body of work examining resilience, there is limited understanding of how the concept of resilience should be tailored for agricultural systems. This study seeks to address this gap by performing a systematic literature review of 50 papers selected from SCOPUS using the PRISMA protocol. A summary of research topics and characteristics by geographical region is presented. The paper also categorizes the types of shocks studied and the corresponding response methods. Results suggest that the focus of resilience research changes by region, which may indicate that design strategies and objectives should also differ by region. Furthermore, the work identifies a need for more simulation-based quantitative research into the impact of resilience.

The biggest advantage of Additive Manufacturing is the individualization of products. Mass Customization is well known as a promising future application. The use of Additive Manufacturing for assembly groups is mostly not reasonable, however combining it with conventional manufacturing processes can lead to new opportunities.

This paper works out concepts to join, by using similar material combinations, an injection molded part with an additive deposited geometry by the Fused-Deposition-Modeling (FDM) process. Therefore, two of the main industrially used polymers, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polypropylene (PP), are selected for further study. In particular, this investigation focuses on the procedural potentials and surface preparation of the injection molded part. By the variation of adhesive bonding, the fusion of similar materials can be identified and tested in several series of testing.

First in general a direct joining function by the FLM process will be tested. After proving this hypothesis, the results will be summarised in a recommendation of joining similar materials, which are manufactured in different ways.

The early consideration of human factors in product development hugely favours the development of products, which excel with a positive user experience. The virtual environment of product development however, still has significant gaps in the virtual assessment and simulation of human factors, especially for user-product interactions composed of human movements. This motivates us to introduce a concept for data-driven prediction and analysis of user-product interactions. Heart of the concept is a predictive component that models the interaction between the user, represented by a musculoskeletal model, and the product, represented by product characteristics. We describe the implementation of this concept based on a pilot study for a lifting task. Motion capturing was performed to build a database and compare the results of our novel approach. The resulting kinematic and dynamic quantities show similar curve profiles with a small constant offset to the measured data. This indicates that the concept enables the virtual comparison of different designs or concepts regarding human factors.

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.

External sources of inspiration can promote the discovery of new ideas as designers ideate on a design task. Data-driven techniques can increasingly enable the retrieval of inspirational stimuli based on nontext-based representations, beyond semantic features of stimuli. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding regarding how humans evaluate similarity between non-semantic design stimuli (e.g., visual). Toward this aim, this work examines human-evaluated and computationally derived representations of visual and functional similarities of 3D-model parts. A study was conducted where participants (n=36) assessed triplet ratings of parts and categorized these parts into groups. Similarity is defined by distances within embedding spaces constructed using triplet ratings and deep-learning methods, representing human and computational representations. Distances between stimuli that are grouped together (or not) are determined to understand how various methods and criteria used to define non-text-based similarity align with perceptions of 'near' and 'far'. Distinct boundaries in computed distances separating stimuli that are 'too far' were observed, which include farther stimuli when modeling visual vs. functional attributes.

Increasing product complexity and individual customer requirements make the design of optimal product families difficult. Numerical optimization supports optimal design but must deal with the following challenges: many design variables, non-linear or discrete dependencies, and many possibilities of assigning shared components to products. Existing approaches use simplifications to alleviate those challenges. However, for use in industrial practice, they often use irrelevant commonality metrics, do not rely on the actual design variables of the product, or are unable to treat discrete variables. We present a two-level approach: (1) a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the best commonality scheme (i.e., assignment scheme of shared components to products) and (2) a particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the design variables for one specific commonality scheme. It measures total cost, comprising manufacturing costs, economies of scales and complexity costs. The approach was applied to a product family consisting of five water hose boxes, each of them being subject to individual technical requirements. The results are discussed in the context of the product family design process.

Today, product success more than ever depends on the satisfaction of consumer needs. Besides, manufacturers need to shorten development cycles and accelerate product release in order to stay competitive. This is achieved by applying customer-oriented methods allowing for fast and reliable acting. During the early phase of product development, requirements acquisition is crucial for later success of products, since specifications are most influenceable at this point. Referring to the decisive concept generation phase, material and production definition is difficult due to the highly complex interrelations between material properties, production process capabilities, and resulting product characteristics. Especially in the context of lightweight design, concurrent material and processing technology selection must be considered due to its various possible interfaces.

Thus, this contribution outlines an integrated approach towards an enhanced material and process related, customer-oriented requirements acquisition during the early phase upstream of product detailing. Here, conventional multi-criteria decision-making and tactile recognition are employed in an agile transformation model.

The part build orientation is a manufacturing variable that must be considered when designing a product to maximise AM opportunities. There are several approaches to selecting the best print direction in the scientific literature by considering different criteria. However, most of the studies are focused on specific AM technologies. It is missing a general method that evaluates a widespread number of criteria. Furthermore, such approaches expect designers establish weights for technical criteria that are too specific, especially during the preliminary design steps. Designers are familiar with criteria like cost-effectiveness, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength.

The paper presents a multi-criteria decision-making approach to optimise the build part orientation in additive manufacturing. The method considers five decision-making criteria (cost-effectiveness, rapidity, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength) and seventeen specific technical criteria. TOPSIS is the method used to optimise the build part orientation. A case study of three components exemplifies the five steps of the procedure.

Digitalization and sustainability are major challenges for today's manufacturing industry. While digitalization is characterized by the incorporation of digital technologies in the products and services as well as the value creation architectures, sustainability requires them to balance economic, environmental and social issues. In both areas, especially Product Service Systems (PSS) are constantly gaining importance. This results in so called smart PSS that integrate digital technologies as well as sustainable PSS which aim at a positive impact on sustainability. Both two concepts cannot be clearly delimited since smart PSS might be designed for sustainability as well and sustainable PSS might be used with digital technologies. This paper aims to investigate the interrelations. To that, digitalization patterns of products and services are evaluated regarding their sustainable impact. The evaluation is conducted by a survey in research and industry. Furthermore, the design of the underlying value creation architecture is investigated. Here, a methodology is proposed enabling companies to optimize their value creation architecture.

Societies are faced to ecological crises and widening disparities. This has to be integrated in the management of complex projects as they are increasingly complex and impactful. Value Analysis can serve assessing the value of a project i.e. knowing how the project will be perceived by the Stakeholders. It is a collaborative approach that helps make decisions in the early stages of a complex project.

This paper aims at demonstrating that a new “Sustainable Value Analysis” (SVA) provides a decision-making support toward sustainability. SVA uses a new definition of Value and a set of indicators based on the Doughnut.

Methods for the introduction of sustainability in the upstream design phases have limitations, which are highlighted in the literature review. Yet, the potentials of value approaches can be shown. Based on this analysis, an illustrative case is proposed to demonstrate how to integrate the ecological and social dimensions in a classical Value Engineering approach to determine SVA. The article concludes that the SVA allows identifying and characterizing the sustainable dimensions of Value, through a collective approach based on Stakeholders.

Monitoring properly the circularity performance of technical products is a point of increasing importance. Yet, evaluating the circularity potential of products during (re)design and development phases is a challenging task. In this study, several C-indicators are experienced by doctoral students and industrialists through two workshops on a real-world industrial product. The values obtained for each indicator are collected and analyzed: as all participant are working on the same technical product with the same dataset, the circularity scores calculated are compared to discuss the reliability and the uncertainty related to these indicators. These new empirical insights are put in parallel with the existing critical analyses of C-indicators from literature. As a result, future research directions on circularity indicators are advanced and discussed, including: the integration of uncertainty considerations into the assessment methodology of circularity indicators; the uptake by industry of such indicators during product design and development; the link between circularity and sustainability scores.

The increasing importance of software as an essential functional provider in products and processes requires that companies master the development capabilities to continiously and quickly deliver high-quality software features. DevOps (acronym for Development and Operations) is an essential approach to these capabilities, which has so far been used predominantly in software-driven companies. This paper investigates the conditions under which DevOps can also be used in the industrial context of series manufacturing in order to be able to steadily develop and provide software features used in these environments (e.g. for monitoring and maintenance of manufacturing machines). A concept for DevOps for manufacturing systems was developed based on current best practices and the specific situation in the industrial company. The concept was then implemented and validated with experts on the basis of initial development cycles, demonstrating the usefulness of DevOps for manufacturing systems.

Understanding the viewpoint of clinicians in a healthcare setting is a vital task to comprehend the success of patients undergoing physical rehabilitation. Addressing user experience is an essential activity which designers undertake when formulating product specifications at the early stages of product design. The involvement of clinicians during the product use-phase influences the progress and achievements attained by the patients throughout their rehabilitation journey. Several clinicians (n=16) were asked to participate in a qualitative study to evaluate the performance of different personae in activities of daily living. The experiences of patients who use rehabilitation products as part of their therapy session at the clinic were evaluated. Based on this evaluation, a set of clinician requirements were formulated to reflect the overall experience when using rehabilitation products. Understanding these requirements brought about several implications to be considered during the design cycle. Through these considerations and by adopting a user-centred design approach, designers are in a better position to design innovative products targeted at providing a high-quality user experience which increases customer satisfaction.

The advent of immersive and interactive technologies has facilitated the growth of the museum and gallery sector by offering a variety of new experiences. In the UK and China, in particular, the museum and gallery sector lies at the heart of the creative industries and makes a significant contribution to cultural growth. Both countries have recognised the impact of such technologies on the growth of the sector and have actively sought opportunities to use them for bilateral collaboration. However, the interest in immersive and interactive technologies among museum and gallery audiences remains underexplored, as do their preferences and behavioural patterns with respect to such technologies. This study discusses the key findings of user research, exploring the awareness, experiences and preferences of current museum and gallery audiences regarding (i) immersive and interactive museum and gallery experiences and (ii) the cultural exchange between the UK and China.