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.

Design of software in the automotive domain often involves simulation to allow early software parametrization. Modeling complex systems or components impacted by the software in an analytical way can be time-consuming, require domain knowledge and executing the analytical models can result in high computational effort. In specific applications, these challenges can be overcome by applying machine learning based simulation. This contribution presents results of a case study in which powertrain components are modeled data-driven with artificial neural networks to support design space exploration

The automotive community has found to design and test autonomous systems, traditional CAE tools are not enough. The number of sensors and controls involved makes it very difficult to predict all the possible scenarios and system reactions to them. An approach to provide input to all the sensors and control systems is to use gaming engines. They are used “headless”, and in other cases with multiple users in the environment. In this paper we will highlight one case on how they are changing how the Army designs, tests, and sets requirements for autonomous ground systems.

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.

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.

While a significant amount of research has documented the importance of design artefacts in design communication, relatively little work has investigated the effect of design artefact quality on the development of a shared understanding between designers. In the current work we focus specifically on sketch quality and the effect of sketch quality on the shared understanding of design dyads. A controlled study with 22 design dyads (44 designers) was conducted to understand the relationship between sketch quality and shared understanding. Results suggest that design artefact quality, measured by sketch understandability, does not predict the shared understanding of a design concept. Our findings hold implications for the fundamental ways in which we evaluate sketch quality and the importance of artefact fidelity for communicative acts.

The wearable products market is growing rapidly. Engaging users on an emotional level may be the key to long-term use and attracting new customers. While researchers have proposed various design approaches to realize design qualities for wearable devices, emotional needs are overlooked in the design process. To bridge this gap, we developed an approach with an online tool that uses a two-axis interactive collage for users to compare and evaluate wearable products with targeted emotion-related descriptive words. This approach enabled us to explore how users perceive products and identify types of emotions that were associated with their preferences for and perceptions of the product's form and visible characteristics. The study demonstrated this design approach to reveal insights into the relationships between product characteristics and design goals, such as user comfort, user delight, and perceived product usefulness. The results showed that products that resemble clothes were perceived as more delightful and comfortable. This study suggests that the approach can be further used to explore other design concepts or goals.

Problems, solutions, and design itself have been framed as spaces in design research. Visualising the design space and how designers explore it, can give insight into the design process. This paper reports on a novel method for creating Design Space Visualisations (DS-Viz) that generates 2D and 3D representations of design spaces. We show how DS-Viz can be used to investigate designer behaviour, design processes and outcomes using a game-based design activity as an example. We discuss DS-Viz implications for design research highlighting potential benefits to design education and practice.

Sketching and prototyping are parts of a ‘reflective conversation with materials of a design situation’ (Schön, 1992). To support this conversation, we developed a reflective tool -the Reflection Canvas- that facilitates reflection activities through sketching and prototyping on the one hand and verbalisation on the other. We introduced the reflective tool to design students. Based on observation and answers from a questionnaire data reveal that guided reflection structured the process in a helpful way. It also turned out students had difficulties to switch from visualisation to verbalisation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Physical prototyping during early stage design typically represents an iterative process. Commonly, a single prototype will be used throughout the process, with its form being modified as the design evolves. If the form of the prototype is not captured as each iteration occurs understanding how specific design changes impact upon the satisfaction of requirements is challenging, particularly retrospectively.

In this paper two different systems for digitising physical artefacts, structured light scanning (SLS) and photogrammetry (PG), are investigated as means for capturing iterations of physical prototypes. First, a series of test artefacts are presented and procedures for operating each system are developed. Next, artefacts are digitised using both SLS and PG and resulting models are compared against a master model of each artefact. Results indicate that both systems are able to reconstruct the majority of each artefact's geometry within 0.1mm of the master, however, overall SLS demonstrated superior performance, both in terms of completion time and model quality. Additionally, the quality of PG models was far more influenced by the effort and expertise of the user compared to SLS.

The scarce availability of water in highly populated cities is about to become a social problem. While the water service companies work on improving the distribution network in order to reduce losses, it is evident that one of the main problems is due to an excess of use of this resource by users. This consumption is relatively controlled when excessive consumption is clearly associated, in the consumer mind, with high costs. However, when users are in public places they tend to consume water because of a loss of correlation with costs. In this paper, we describe the design of a device to be installed in public environments, which aims to reduce the consumption of water. The device measures in real time the flow of water and sends the user visual and sound information trying to create a link between consumption and costs. The device has been installed in a university campus bathroom and has been tested. Test results show a reduction in water consumption, especially in the interactive prototype approach compared to the conventional treatment. Further modifications for future development of the interactive device is also discussed.

Generative Design (GD) is a design approach that uses algorithms to generate designs. This paper investigates the role of optimisation algorithms in GD process. We study how Pareto Fronts – a classical optimization algorithm output – help designers to browse the variety associated with a design problem. Thanks to the “splitting condition” from design theory, we show that valuable Pareto Fronts for designers are those that allow the exploration of a variety of design parameters without modifying substantially the performance of the designed solution. We call “Splitting Pareto Front” the Pareto Fronts that display this property and investigate how to generate them. We compare, on an electrical battery design problem, two optimization algorithms – NSGA-II and MAP-Elites – based on the design parameters variety they generate. Our results show that MAP-Elites generates Pareto Fronts that are more splitting than those generated by NSGA-II. We then discuss this result in term of the design process: which algorithm is best suited for which design task? We conclude with the importance for future research on Generative Design Algorithms (GDA) to study jointly the functioning of GDA and their expected contribution to the design process.

In the context of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance, collecting accurate data from technical systems is an important corner stone of the advancing digitalization. For gathering precise data of the current state of a system, measurements from within the process can be utilised. To measure in process without disrupting the system is a challenge that can be tackled by using the physical properties of the components of the system. In this paper a method to systematically find such possible sensory utilizable components (SuC), based on their inherent physical effects is presented.