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.

The UK construction industry is an important aspect of the UK economy; however, it is struggling to keep pace with wider economic growth and if it does not change it will not be able to keep up with demand. There is a gap between academia and practice, and little understanding of how to successfully innovate within the industry. Following a workshop with 25 construction industry professionals on the barriers to innovation in the construction industry, key themes were developed through thematic analysis including regulation, fragmentation and constant change.

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.

Although testing is critical in industries, the general approaches of testing in engineering design are under-represented in academia. This research investigates the current state of testing based on design textbooks. The findings suggest there is no clear definition of testing. Testing appears in different design stages with adjacent concepts such as prototyping, experimentation, verification, and validation. The processes of testing and its role within engineering design are ambiguous. Recommendations to design educators are provided, and the limitations of the study are discussed.

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.

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.

Prototyping is essential for fuzzy front-end product development. The prototyping process answers questions about critical assumptions and supports design decisions, but it is often unstructured and context-dependent. Previously, we showed how to guide novice designers in early development stages with prototyping milestones. Here, we studied the prototyping success perceived by novice design teams. This was done in two steps: (1) teams were asked to assign each prototype to a milestone, a specific purpose, a fidelity level, and a human-centered design lens, and then evaluate the success using a predefined set of criteria. (2) Teams were interviewed about the success of the prototyping process, this time using self-chosen criteria. Results related to (1) show that teams perceived prototyping activities with respect to desirability and problem validation significantly less successful than prototyping activities towards feasibility and solution validation. Results related to (2) show that teams mostly chose success criteria related to how well prototypes supported communication, decision making, learning, and tangibility. This insight may be used to give priorities to further improvement of methods and guidance in these areas.

Representation of design information using causal ontologies is very effective for creative ideation in product design. Hence researchers created databases with models of engineering and biological systems using causal ontologies. Manually building many models using technical documents requires significant effort by specialists. Researchers worked on the automatic extraction of design information leveraging the computational techniques of Machine Learning. But these methods are data intensive, have manual touch points and have not yet reported the end-to-end performance of the process. In this paper, we present the results of a new method inspired by the cognitive process followed by specialists. This method uses the Knowledge Graph with Rule based reasoning for information extraction for the SAPPhIRE causality model from natural language texts. Unlike the supervised learning methods, this new method does not require data intensive modelling. We report the performance of the end-to-end information extraction process, which is found to be a promising alternative.

This paper proposes an analytical framework for estimating the domain where a type of technology can be used in a system. In order to achieve this aim, we have elaborated on the concepts of technology critical, technology sensitive, and the technology comfort zone, to analytically assess the impact of a new technology in the early phases of system design. The result is a general method to indicate the range of requirements that can result in valid designs. This tool can assist in the decision-making processes for technology portfolio selection based on sustainable principles.

The maintenance of an industrial plant is mainly based on analogue and manual methods and processes. In the future, the maintenance data of the real object should be determined digital and transferred to a PDM system in real time. This is made possible with a digital method of component identification. This publication presents a system-based component identification using Mixed Reality. Coordinates are determined by the terminal device and compared with a reference structure. After successful identification, maintenance data can be determined and automatically transferred to a PDM System.

As time-to-market is getting shorter, customer needs have to be identified as early as possible in product development. Correctly applied, corporate foresight can give a glimpse into the future to anticipate such needs and thus gain a competitive advantage. A support tool to choose the appropriate method of foresight is not available yet. Thus, a literature study on foresight methods in industry is performed and a novel decision support tool is proposed which avoids high entrepreneurial risks. Based on the findings, potentials for future work are identified for different types of methods.

Mobile health, or mHealth, solutions offer great potential in the area of self-monitoring of chronic conditions, where most of the day-to-day management of the condition is done at home by the patient or their caregivers. Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep condition caused by an orexin deficiency in the brain resulting in its inability to regulate sleep cycles, causing poor quality sleep during the day and problems with wakefulness during the day. This paper set out to investigate whether Habitual, an app for tracking symptoms, daily habits and medication adherence for people with narcolepsy could increase their sense of empowerment. Ten participants were asked to test the app during a period of 30 days, after which they were asked to answer a survey to investigate whether their perception of their empowerment towards the management of narcolepsy had changed. Although using the app for only 30 days provides a very limited understanding of the impact of Habitual, this study shows positive indication for future mHealth solutions for the management of narcolepsy. Future studies should test the openness to using an app for the management of narcolepsy with a wider cohort.

This paper reports the application of the methods and tools of fault-tolerant design to an automated shifting system and their reflection and extension. Fault-tolerant design has emerged in the last years and is generally understood as a collection of strategies, methods, algorithms, tools and insights which are intended to support the development of technical systems which are fault-tolerant because of their controllability but also their inherent fault-tolerant design qualities. The field of application is a shifting system for the gear system of a formula student driverless race car.

Tuned mass dampers may be used to improve vibrational behavior of structures. However, they require space to move. This paper presents an approach to incorporate tuned mass dampers into a lightweight-optimized structure without extra space requirement. It is based on (1) topology optimization (TopOpt) with unit cells and (2) vibration reduction with multiple tuned mass dampers (m-TMD) within the unit cells. The topology optimization is performed with a physics-informed penalty factor, unique to the chosen unit cell. Subsequently, the weight optimal density distribution is realized by populating the design domain with unit cells of ten different densities. To reduce the induced vibration, m-TMDs are placed inside the cavities of the unit cells in the grey scale regions. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated for the design of a 2-segment robot arm. The resulting unit cell robotic arm (UC-Arm) is 3.6% lighter than the reference model, maintains the same static performance, and shows a 60% smaller dynamic displacement in the observed frequency range. No extra space is required for the motion of the m-TMD.

Performance assessment plays a crucial role in engineering education. Yet most instructor assessment focuses on student outcomes to analyse achievements. Although there is extensive research analysing student productions, however, few studies have explored assessment from instructor perspectives, especially when reporting their assessment practice. This study examines instructors' assessment of student performance through the lens of course review reports (CRRs). The CRRs were collected from 5 core undergraduate courses submitted for annual review and were related to the mappings of the measurable outcomes to performance indicators, assessment methods, and level of engagement. Regardless of the variability in reporting the student design experience, instructors' assessment and potential gaps, as well as strong existing correlations between some indicators and associated assessment methods, the study showed that the CRR may be a powerful and complementary approach to investigate the complexity of multidisciplinary design and design assessment.

Subjective product quality is a fundamental aspect to maintain a high level of user acceptance and to provide a good user experience. Prototypes can be used to evaluate subjective product quality in early design phases. We conducted an empirical study to examine the influence of different (re)presentations of prototypes determined by the chosen technology (2D image, VR, AR, 3D print) and the user's technology acceptance. Based on the results we recommend 2D images as most reliable for evaluating subjective product quality.

The increasing availability of smart products creates a more pronounced need for designers to prototype and communicate interactive and environmental qualities of product during their design process. This paper explores which elements of User journey, Storyboards and Wireframes contribute to communicating these qualities, and how they might integrate with sketching. Results show depictions of user and temporal elements alongside low fidelity sketches are deemed most important. Our findings form the basis to propose and subsequently test combined prototyping approaches in future research.

The R&D of Autonomous Transportation Systems (ATS) is hindered by the lack of industrial feedback and client's knowledge about technological possibilities. In addition, because of intellectual properties (IP) issues, technology consulting companies can't directly reuse developed functionalities with different clients. In this context, requirements reuse technics presents a good way to capitalize on their knowledge while avoiding IP issues. However, the literature review on requirements reuse processes doesn't propose methods to the application of reuse processes with little information about the system's operational context. In this paper, we present a semi-automated requirement reuse and recycle process for ATS R&D. The process helps designers’ copes with the lack of inputs from the clients. Requirements candidates are retrieved from a database using Natural Language Processing and traceability propagation. It is applied to 3 use cases with inputs less than 5 concepts from the client's needs. The results validate its efficiency through number requirements retrieved and the analysis time consumption

This paper introduces a new concept for the automation of the assembly planning process, to enable Design for Assembly (DfA). The approach involves the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to assembly sequence planning (ASP) based on a 3D-CAD model. The ASP algorithm determines assembly sequences through assembly by disassembly. The assembly sequence is then used for the generation of subassemblies by considering the product contact information. The approach aims to support the creation of the manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM) by automating the assembly planning process.

To enable the circular economy paradigm, it is important to design easy-to-disassemble products. A new method, known as Design for Circular Disassembly (DfCD), has been proposed to enhance product disassembly performances toward circularity. The method was tested on a small-sized product, showing promising results. However, its applicability to medium-sized products remains unclear. The goal of this article is to assess the effectiveness of DfCD on medium-sized products, particularly washing machines. Results showed DfCD can be extended to medium-sized products, increasing model complexity.