Flexibility and changeability are crucial when it comes to the design of embedded automotive architectures. However, flexibility and changeability are concepts rooted in the overall product and its objectives, while architectural design decisions may affect local subsystems as well as the overall system. Axiomatic design is applied to bridge this gap: The architecture is decomposed into its entities and changeability is described through the design's information content. Five domains of actions to foster changeability are identified and generic action schemes are derived.

User Experience is becoming an increasing centre of interest both in the academic and industrial worlds. Design agencies are no strangers to this phenomenon and are willing to shift from product-oriented design toward user experience design. However, their design process is often loose which may explain a lack of final UX quality or proof of quality, and does not allow to diagnose misuses and improvement opportunities due to a lack of UX formulation and traceability. We propose in this paper to retrospectively represent a design project and its specified, designed and validated UX, in the perspective to conduct a posterior collective diagnosis of UX design in a design agency. The proposed representation model is used to analyse one design project. Results show that only a few UX traces are found in the presented project, and that many dimensions are not considered (like perceptions or affects). Finally, we discuss the next steps of this tool's deployment to create a shared mental model of the design process among the design players.

To indicate the effective team-building activities implemented independently by the students in a project-based learning class in higher education in Japan, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the students of the Design Project class held at a Japanese graduate school in 2020 and 2021. The interviewees are 12 students belonging to the top three teams regarding the evaluation of the final presentation. Based on the classifications of the comments, we indicate the best practices of team-building activities corresponding to the timing and team characteristics.

Sustainability is an issue concerned with social, economic and environmental problems. The primary aim of sustainability is to fulfil the needs of the present society without compromising potential needs of future generations. Product design has a significant impact on sustainability, and a sensible decision-making process that considers trade-offs at early design stage is critical to the success of product design that addresses environmental sustainability issues. This study aims to identify and review the decision-making process for environmentally sustainable design. A comprehensive literature review has been performed to establish the trends over the past two decades. The decision-making process for sustainable design has been summarised, and the frequently-used decision-making methods, such as ANP/AHP, TOPSIS, and BWM, have been identified and discussed. A framework for the selection of Multi-criteria Decision-making (MCDM) methods has been developed to aid researchers to select appropriate MCDM methods in sustainable design. In addition, future research opportunities have also been identified.

Providing the correct destination at the end of the product's use phase is essential for value recovery and to reduce the environmental impact at this lifecycle stage. To understand the e-waste recycling behavior among users, this article aims to identify the most common destinations given to smartphones when they are no longer used. A systematic literature review was carried out, and 13 studies were selected for a meta-analysis. The variable is the selection of the most common destinations for e-waste: reuse and recycling (recovered value), storage and informal collection (missed value), and household waste (destroyed value). The results present a summarized measure with the combined proportion of the studies for each category. Studies were weighted by the precision of confidence interval estimates presented in Forest Plots. The main results point out common problems and demonstrate how the strategies and policies adopted in each country can influence the chosen methods of disposal. These specificities require unique strategies to deal with local problems. As a secondary contribution, this study proposes guidelines to reduce e-waste generation and to create awareness and infrastructure to increase value recovery.

Increasing complexity of products and design processes leads to intensive collaboration of different stakeholders in technical product development. This causes a demand for suitable methods of collaboration across department interfaces, as between design and simulation. The paper investigates typical barriers of collaboration at this interface and measures to overcome them. Methods of complexity management form links based on literature and empirical data from online surveys and interview studies. The framework uses a set of structural metrics to analyse collaboration networks systematically.

User experience (UX) focused business needs to survive and plan its new product development (NPD) activities in a highly turbulent environment. The latter is a function of volatile UX and technology trends, competition, unpredictable events, and user needs uncertainty. To address this problem, the concept of design roadmapping has been proposed in the literature. It was argued that tools built on the idea of design roadmapping have to be very flexible and data-driven (i.e., be able to receive feedback from users in an iterative manner). At the same time, a model-based approach to roadmapping has emerged, promising to achieve such flexibility. In this work, we propose to incorporate design roadmapping to model-based roadmapping and integrate it with various user testing approaches into a single tool to support a flexible data-driven NPD planning process.

The emergence of intermediary platforms created networks that facilitate peer-to-peer interactions, as well as encourage the sharing of goods and services within the context of collaborative consumption and cost saving. This article sets out to inspect “why the sharing economy is so successful” and provide a critical viewpoint on the topic's essential ideas, while also taking a perspective on the advantages and disadvantages that affect the end users. A literature review paired with case studies of Airbnb, Uber, and other applications of the shared economy, looks upon how despite their rapid market growth in the past decade and public approval, such platforms caused disruptions to the markets they operate in. Results indicate that by being involved as a part of the collaborative consumption ecosystem, either as a provider or a user, the absence of personal ownership is key, while the utilisation of the product needs to be maximised to result in a pleasant experience. However, it is critical that the development of these platforms which thrive on connecting people stays closely monitored by regulatory bodies, and that the legislation needed for prevention of unethical practices follows quickly enough to ensure rightful operation.

The recognition of the value of design has resulted in an increased number of programs and courses that include design and evaluate design competencies. However, there is no common reference system to (1) identify and assess the design competency of learners and the level of design competency aimed for by a course or curriculum; (2) universally recognize design competencies and competency levels.

Our research goal is to identify and define distinct levels of design competency and develop a framework to help instructors, design learners, institutes as well as employers assess and/or recognize competency. This paper introduces our DesCA (Design Competency Assessment) framework and places it in the context of other frameworks. We describe how DesCA helps: (1) identify and assess design competencies associated with different design activities planned for a course or curriculum; (2) formulate learning outcomes and select appropriate competency levels, methods and tools; (3) plan and develop the design content of courses and curricula; (4) ensure curricular consistency across courses.

The vision is to make DesCA a digital platform that can serve as an international standard for design teaching, learning and curriculum development.

Complexity of products and systems is increasing through digitalization, interdisciplinarity as well as high technology maturity and new business models. In consequence, new product development (NPD) projects need to manage and satisfy a large number of requirements from a broad range of stakeholders. Yet, NPD projects are often delayed due to requirement changes. In this paper, a new method for analyzing requirement change propagation is presented. The method is based on the assessment of requirement interrelations structured in a requirements structure matrix by a modified page-rank algorithm. By the method, a high number of strongly interrelated requirements can be analyzed in an efficient manner. Additionally, higher-level interrelations as well as the relative weights of requirements are also incorporated in the analysis. Hereby, an efficient holistic approach towards the analysis of requirement change propagation is proposed.

Value Analysis (VA) is a collaborative method that could be used to make a decision in the early phase of complex projects. In this framework, Stakeholders are involved into the process of decisionmaking and project success is facilitated. Systeme Architechting (SA) is a set of processes used for the conceptual phase of the design of complex systems while System Engineering (SE) is the set of processes used for the design phase of the system. In complex projects, Stakeholders are multiple and carry specific technical, social and environmental expectations that define their perceived Value of the project. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that VA and SA are two complementary approaches to collect and analyse Stakeholder needs in a complex project. The article presents an analysis of the literature review on VA and SA / SE. Based on this analysis, an illustration case is proposed to show how to integrate VA into SA to understand the needs of Stakeholders. The article concludes that the two methods VA and SA can be combined to analyze and would allow following several dimensions of Value (economic, social and environmental) within a complex project.

In recent years, the use of virtual reality (VR) has been a promising opportunity to improve the immersive experience in virtual environments. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of immersive VR experiences on an individual's creativity. To do this, we first identified the characteristics of VR that are closely related to creative performance. Considering these factors, we designed and implemented the interaction method and the three outdoor and indoor virtual environments (Wilderness, City Park, and Office). We evaluated the effectiveness of the virtual environments with 12 participants. The user study results show that outdoor and indoor immersive virtual experiences improved their creativity skills. We concluded by analysing how factors such as simulator sickness and perceived workload influence creativity levels. Moreover, our study showed the potentiality of using immersive virtual environments to enhance individuals’ creative performance.

To transfer methods from science to industrial application is an important task of engineering design researchers. However, the way in which this is done leaves still room for improvement. A look beyond the horizon into the intra-industrial transfer of methods can therefore be helpful. Based on general requirements and success factors as well as successful intra-industry transfer examples, this paper proposes the P4I process for the transfer of methods from academy to industry.

Ad-hoc systems are socio-technical systems emerging in response to dynamic problematic situations. These systems form when situation systems interact with respondent systems organized by human agents using elements available in the situation and assets brought in from outside the situation. The immediacy of formation, fast evolution, and short lifecycles of ad-hoc systems intertwine design, implementation, and operation activities in complex ways not addressed by current approaches to Systems Engineering focusing on more sedate environments. The proposed framework presents a language for classifying fundamental building blocks of ad-hoc systems – single-agent intervention, staging, readiness, and development systems. Further classification according to the physical location of agents and assets relative to situations generates 16 system classes on the 4x4 matrix of Ad-hoc Systems Gameboard, which is a helpful tool for managing the evolution of system portfolios. Combining the Gameboard with mapping the systems onto the PSI matrix reveals additional relationships and evolution patterns, opening up promising directions to address the challenge of designing, planning, and implementing interventions in complex situations.

Considering transformation processes within organizations, reflection is an enabler for learning and adaption of engineering processes, methods, and tools. Moreover, reflection as a core element of agile engineering approaches. However, a sound understanding of reflection behaviors of engineers or engineering teams is lacking. In this paper we proposed a structured reflection procedure including different dimensions to reflect on. To analyse reflection behavior of engineers and engineering teams we propose a coding scheme comprising of nine behaviors. The coding scheme allows to evaluate the reflection behavior in real time and give feedbacks to improve the quality of reflection. The proposed coding scheme is initially tested within a workshop with industry partners.

Knowledge is a crucial factor in state-of-the-art product development. It is often provided by stakeholders from divers disciplinary and individual backgrounds and has to be integrated to create competitive products. Still, it is not fully understood, how knowledge is generated, transformed, transferred and integrated in complex product development processes. To investigate the dynamic interrelations between involved stakeholders, applied knowledge types and related artefacts, researchers at the TU Berlin conducted and evaluated a student experiment to study basic phenomena of development projects. In relation to research methods and instruments applied in this experiment, various improvement opportunities were identified. In this paper, the experimental setting and its results are critically analysed from a social science perspective in order to generate improved research design. Based on the results of this analysis, a first set of methods and instruments from social sciences are identified that can be applied in further experiments. The goal is to develop a methodological toolbox that can be used to approach research on knowledge dynamics in product development.

Amputees face challenges with prosthesis such as cost, long delivery periods, as well as social discomfort. Simultaneously, the prosthetists and manufacturers have a difficulty to handle such diverse issues. We thus contribute a Prosthetic Life-Cycle Service System (ProLiSS) Framework, prescribed to involve amputees in different life phases. From an evaluation of ProLiSS, we conclude that it influences how prosthetics need to be designed and that it is beneficial to perform further research to provide manufacturers with a systematic, amputee-centered development and servicing framework.

Complexity in systems design can be reduced by computing permissible ranges for some crucial design variables that need to be defined in an early design phase. These ranges are calculated such that there is sufficient tolerance for the remaining design variables in later design phases, while still achieving the overall system design goals. A new algorithm for this approach is presented and applied to the design of a vehicle powertrain mount system. The results show large permissible ranges for mount positions while maintaining sufficient tolerance for mount stiffnesses.

Spatial Thinking (ST) is an important part of reasoning. In contrast to Rigid ST (R-ST), Non-Rigid ST (NR-ST) has hardly been researched and tests do not exist, even though NR-ST is crucial for professions that deal with space and time such as engineering and design. Our study at 4 different universities confirms that R-ST does not predict performance in NR-ST; that performance in Non-Rigid ST is significantly lower than in R-ST; and that performance of students in later semesters is not better than in the first semesters. These results highlight the need for further research into NR-ST.

The increasing use of disposable takeaway cups negatively affects the environment due to their non-recyclability and waste. This study investigates the adoption and sustained use of reusable takeaway cups in Belgium, including routines and experience. We did structured interviews (n=58), a survey (n=300), diary studies (n=8) and interviews with baristas (n=8). The findings provide recommendations including clear communication, incentives, and user-friendly cup design. Future research should test interventions and consider regional and cultural variations in sustainable coffee consumption.