This study examines the relationship between the product structuring principles chosen in modular product families and the business results of companies. In the three case studies of the article, it can be seen that products that meet the modularity definitions discussed in the literature have been able to utilise the benefits of modularity in a very varied way. In one business case, the effect of modularity on business has been negative. In two other cases, the effect has been positive - in one of these even the profitability of the business has significantly improved. The aim of this article is to identify whether product designing consistently has been following some product structuring principles previously mentioned in modularisation literature or whether case studies bring new principles to consciousness. In all case studies, the product structuring principles used are also discussed in the previous modularisation studies at a varying extent. In the discussion section, we raise the question of whether the recording and use of product structuring principles in design briefs could lead to making the product design decisions that affect the business positively.

To satisfy customer needs in the best way, companies offer them an almost infinite number of product variants. Although, an identical product was not built before, the values of its attributes must be determined during the product configuration process. This paper introduces a methodical approach to predict the values of product attributes based on customer feature configurations using machine learning. Machine learning reduces the effort compared to rule-based expert systems and is both, more accurate and faster. The approach was validated by predicting vehicle weights using industrial data.

The spare parts play a vital role in sustaining the operation and longevity of products and systems, but their unavailability can lead to prolonged downtime or expensive replacements. The integration of 3D scanning and Additive Manufacturing (AM) presents a promising path for spare part production. However, to utilise the full potential of AM, sometimes, redesign of the original part is needed. This paper investigates and proposes a new approach that integrates reverse engineering and redesign of an original part based on functional analysis to support the manufacturing of AM spare parts.

The tolerancing of products for manufacturing is usually performed at the end of the design process and the responsibility of the designer. Although components are commonly tolerated to ensure functionality, time-based influences, like wear, that occur during operation, are often neglected. This could result in small amounts of scrap after production, but high quantities of failure during operation. To overcome this issue, this paper presents an approach to perform a multi-objective optimization considering tolerances based on a wear simulation. Thereby, mean shifts serve as optimization variables, while the aim of the optimization is to generate an optimal ratio of scrap to failure. In addition, the optimization results are interpreted and further options for the designer are presented. Moreover, the approach is exemplary applied to a use case.

Among 75-90% of residents in Danish nursing homes are diagnosed with dementia. This article explore how a team of five 3rd semester bachelor's design students sought to improve quality of life for elderly people with dementia in a nursing home through a co-design process of a new sensory stimulation technology. Participatory Design researchers agree that it is important to involve diverse actors in the design process such as elderly with dementia, nursing home management, nursing staff etc. But when involving many different actors in designing new products, services and systems the challenge is to navigate the many perspectives and concerns of these actors, which is often conflicting and hence needs negotiating. ‘We draw upon the ANT framework to analyse how ‘matters of concern’ (MoCs) are negotiated and to discuss how designers navigate by staging and facilitating design interactions to support negotiation of MoCs among numerous actors during the design process.

Information usage is a key aspect of creative cognition and has been shown to influence design outcomes. The goal of this study was to investigate the information seeking behavior of student designers while validating a previously developed “Typology of Design Information” framework. Participants were asked to use and evaluate pieces of information during the idea generation process. Results show a discrepancy between the information that participants naturally sought out and their perceived utility (helpfulness) of the information. However, individually significant relationships between perceived utility and behavior were found with features generated by participants, suggesting that even though participants' perception of the utility of information pieces and their actual behavior are not related, both constructs have an identifiable influence on design outcomes. This study advances the Typology of Design Information framework by empirically exploring the link between the types of information used by novice designers and the ideas generated, and it illustrates that participants employ complex cognitive behavior when engaging with design information to generate novel ideas.

Engineering designers are encouraged to consider relevant contextual factors throughout their design processes. However, specific practices for incorporating context into design processes are lacking in the existing literature, and curricula related to the use of context during design processes is limited. As a preliminary step toward characterizing novice engineering designers' use of contextual factors, we qualitatively coded 10 mechanical engineering capstone design reports for contextual factors; half of the projects had domestic sponsors with varying themes, and the other half of the projects had international sponsors with a global health theme. Our findings showed that teams considered technological and institutional factors most frequently; other factors were considered less frequently. Global health themed design teams considered more contextual factors than non-global health themed teams. There was considerable variability among the contextual factors considered, as well as the stages during which they were considered. These outcomes have the potential to inform the development of pedagogical tools to support the acquisition of skills related to formally addressing context during engineering design processes.

Collaborations between design engineers and bioscientists offer novel opportunities that could help solving some of the biggest challenges organisations and societies are facing. Combining design and bioscience has the potential to create responsible and desirable products/services, however such ventures come with challenges rising from boundaries between practices. This research explores boundary objects as sources of framing in multidisciplinary collaborations. The results are based on a descriptive study with synthetic biologists and design engineers working on an innovation-driven task.

The haptic propositions derived from the textile prototypes often allow for more than one interpretation. It impacts the decision on design alternatives during the phase of design evaluation and validation. The present study aims to conquer this challenge with a haptic design case study of automotive upholstery fabric. It links experimental psychophysics with design decision-making. The study results show that visual cues influence haptic detection accuracy and constancy to choose a final design option.

Industry is a main stakeholder when it comes to realising the transition towards a sustainable future. Academia, with its, knowledge and methods, needs to support the industry on this journey. This paper, focuses on the practical learnings on how to implement sustainability research from an industrial perspective. It aims to share some lessons learnt from a longitudinal case study and a development journey in implementing sustainability research in the product innovation process at GKN Aerospace Engine System. The paper gives an overview, based on a literature study, of what is required to successfully implement sustainability in product development. It also provides a summary of the different research projects at the company with learnings from practical and academic perspectives, and the main learnings and changes in relation to different development phases in the sustainability journey. Although, this journey began over ten years ago, and shows the importance of long-term collaboration, it provides key-factors that can be applied also in short term collaborations and for faster implementation of research in general and sustainable product development research in particular.

This study undertakes a systematic analysis of literature within Circular Economy (CE) in an industrial perspective, with a focus on understanding the consideration of the biological and technological cycles, as well as dual circularity. The paper articulates the key research differences, gaps and trends on the basis of publication evolution, key subject areas, influential journals and keywords co-occurrence mapping. The analysis shows the increasing publication trend with dominance of technological cycle and a wide variety of subject areas incorporated in CE biological, technological and dual cycles. Due to the multidisciplinary and transversal nature of CE, as well as its diverse interpretation and applications, an expansion and consolidation of the subject areas and journals are expected in the years to come. Analysis of co-occurrence on the authors' keywords underlined a limited focus of a business perspective research within the biological cycle, heterogeneous and proactive technological cycle but fragmented research on dual circularity. Further analysis of synergies and limitations is necessary to enhance business effectiveness towards enhanced sustainability.

Additive Manufacturing technologies are based on a layer-by-layer build-up. This offers the possibility to design complex geometries or to integrate functionalities in the part. Nevertheless, limitations given by the manufacturing process apply to the geometric design freedom. These limitations are often unknown due to a lack of knowledge of the cause-effect relationships of the process. Currently, this leads to many iterations until the final part fulfils its functionality. Particularly for small batch sizes, producing the part at the first attempt is very important. In this study, a structured approach to reduce the design iterations is presented. Therefore, the cause-effect relationships are systematically established and analysed in detail. Based on this knowledge, design guidelines can be derived. These guidelines consider process limitations and help to reduce the iterations for the final part production. In order to illustrate the approach, the spare parts production via laser powder bed fusion is used as an example.

Europe's healthcare systems are under strain with an ageing population contributing to increased risk of strokes. Rapid technology adaption is needed to prevent, rehabilitate and manage symptoms. This paper identifies what technology platforms are most familiar and accessible to stroke patients to guide designers and engineers to develop future interventions. A survey was distributed to 100 inpatients at a stroke unit, identifying patients' accessibility and usage of personal technologies. Results showed that desktop/laptops and smartphones were most used as opposed to tablets and smartwatches. Different technologies were used for different tasks with a notable lack of devices used for personal health. The underlying reasons for this are discussed with recommendations made on what personal technology platforms should be implemented by designers and engineers in technology-based health interventions.

Among additive manufacturing processes, wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is one of the most promising methods for manufacturing complex near-net-shape parts, as it allows the layer-by-layer deposition of welded material at a high deposition rate. However, this technology is highly dependent on deposition conditions and thermomechanical phenomena during the process. Therefore, process simulation could be used to analyse the effects of different deposition parameters on the thermomechanical results to optimise the process. However, as the computing time required for this study may become prohibitive, a dedicated strategy is needed to reduce it while maintaining a good level of accuracy. In this study, only the thermal analysis of the process is investigated. An efficient metamodel based on B-spline entities is developed to emulate the thermal response of the WAAM process when building a mild steel four-layer wall structure. Thanks to B-spline entities, the temperature profile at different locations is approximated as a function of a subset of deposition parameters of WAAM process, and the results are compared with the simulated temperature profile resulting from a validation dataset.

Coordination in system design requires an interplay between different roles. In this work, we identify five design team roles that pertain to the partitioning and coordination of distributed design team tasks. The proposed characterization is based on self-reported responsibilities and communication behaviors from 109 student designers in 22 teams at the conclusion of a semester-long design project. The self-reports capture both how team members viewed their own work as well as communication patterns between team members. We leverage two representations of this data. Through text analysis, we identify keywords describing team member roles and responsibilities. Social network analysis can further distinguish roles based on team communication behaviors. Cluster analysis on both types of data identifies groups of individuals with similar characteristics. The resulting five clusters capture common roles in system design teams that simultaneously capture the diverse responsibilities and communication patterns.

Therapy in early childhood is facilitated through toys and play. While mainstream toys are designed for children, therapeutic toys need to satisfy requirements from clinicians, caregivers, and children. The study presented in this paper investigated the challenges that 22 international toy designers encounter during the design process and whether support is required when developing products for speech and language therapy, through a mixed-method approach. Results show that considerable challenges are encountered during the early design stages. Nonetheless, the toy design process remains unsupported, while no support is available for designers to consider therapeutic needs. Based on the feedback received, eleven requirements were identified upon which a user-centred design support framework was proposed to assist toy designers during the task clarification stage, taking into account the affordances that therapeutic toys should have without inhibiting the creative process.

For some years now, a part of the population in Europe has been willing to moderate its consumption and to enter into a sustainable waste reduction perspective. Repair is an important lever in the sustainability of products. It requires appropriate approaches depending on the actors involved, whether they are public, private or at the consumer level. Repair cafés are thus born of local citizen initiatives to act on the life cycle of everyday consumer products. We conducted a qualitative study based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the actors of repair cafés in the Grenoble area (France) and carried out an analysis of qualitative data. This analysis, according to three pre-defined fields, technology-competencies-motivations, reveals the perception of the actors on the current obstacles and opportunities for the development of the amateur repair practice. The results obtained support studies already carried out on the subject and show that design is still failing to match amateur reparation requirements. Besides, the social role of these third places takes precedence over the ecological and economic dimension of repair.

This paper proposes an optimization framework based on the OpenMDAO software library intended for engineer-to-order products and applies it to the conceptual design of a Mobile Miner. A Mobile Miner is a complex machine and a flexible alternative to Tunnel Boring Machines for small-scale tunneling and mining applications. The proposed framework is intended for use in early design and quotation stages with the objective to get fast estimates of important product characteristics, such as excavation rate and cutter lifetime. The ability to respond fast to customer requests is vital when offering customized products for specific applications and thereby to stay competitive on the global market. This is true for most engineer-to-order products and especially for mining equipment where each construction project is unique with different tunnel geometries and rock properties. The presented framework is applied to a specific use-case where the design of the miner's cutter wheel is in focus and a set of Pareto optimal designs are obtained. Furthermore, the framework extends the capabilities of OpenMDAO by including support for mixed-variable formulations and it supports an exploratory approach to design optimization.

In this contribution it is argued that in responsible design engineers should be transparent towards stakeholders about the goals they intend to realise with their designs. The emergence of responsible design in, e.g., value-sensitive design, design for values, social design, nudging and positive design, is to be welcomed. It has however the weakness of overconfidence which may lead engineers to suspend earlier commitments to society as given in engineering codes of conduct and ethics, and practices of seeking informed consent and taking blame. It is argued that these earlier commitments lead to the requirement that engineers should be transparent about the goals in responsible designs. Providing this transparency support moreover the societal acceptance of responsible design since it positions engineers doing responsible design as subscribing to values such as respect, honesty and trust. I illustrate the argument with a case of social design and a case of nudging.

This paper presents a novel method for automatic contradiction detection in requirements engineering using a hybrid approach combining formal logic with Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3. Our three-phase process detects contradictions by identifying conditionals and pseudo-grammatical elements, and employing LLMs for nuanced contradiction detection. Tested extensively, including on a real-world electric bus project, our method achieved 99% accuracy and 60% recall. This approach significantly reduces manual effort, enhances quality, and is scalable for future advancements.