For successful human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration in design, human designers must properly use AI input. Some factors affecting that use are designers’ self-confidence and competence and those variables' impact on reliance on AI. This work studies how designers’ self-confidence before and during teamwork and overall competence are associated with their performance as teammates, measured by AI reliance and overall team score. Results show that designers’ self-confidence and competence have very different impacts on their collaborative performance depending on the accuracy of AI.

Despite its transformative impact, a systematic approach to Smart PSS development remains elusive. Addressing this, the study introduces a dynamic conceptual model named DHSmart and its accompanying canvas, adaptable to various contexts and technological advancements. Notably, it offers a structured approach to designing ‘Smart’ in Smart PSS, capturing the interplay between data, humans, and smart systems while directing digitalisation that achieves competitive advantage. It also serves as a unifying framework, enabling meaningful interdisciplinary contributions in theory and practice.

The field of design practice and design education is reaching out to address problems that cannot be solved by introducing a single product or service. Complex societal problems such as gender inequality cannot be solved using a traditional problem-solving oriented design approach. The specific characteristics of these problems require new ways of dealing with the dynamics, scale and complexity of the problem.

Systemic design is a design approach integrating systems thinking in combination with more traditional design methodologies, addressing complex and systemic problems. This paper reports a systemic design approach in an educational context for the case of academic gender inequality. We show the way the problem was addressed and how design students were invited to take a systemic perspective, provide integrated interventions and take first steps in providing instruments for implementation. We conclude with the learnings from this case study, both on the process and the results.

The growing research field of gamification promises new insights and innovative methods for the active design of user experience. This article examines the extent to which gamification complements the established methods of user experience design in the context of product development. To this end, assessment criteria are proposed that can be used to evaluate human-centred design methods. A qualitative comparison is then used to determine the added value of the innovative field of gamification for future user experience design in consumer products.

With the growth of online marketplaces and social media, product designers have been seeing an exponential growth of data available, which can serve as an extremely valuable source of information communicated from customers without geographical limitations. The data will reveal customers’ preferences, which can be expensive and slow to obtain via traditional methods such as survey and questionnaires. While existing methods in the literature have been proposed to extract product information and make inference from online data, they have limitations, especially in providing reliable results and in dealing with data sparsity. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to conduct an Important-performance analysis from online reviews. The major steps of this method involve using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify product attributes, using IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding tool to perform aspect-based sentiment analysis, and using XGBoost model to infer product attribute importance from the collected dataset. In our case study, we have collected over 150,000 text reviews of more than 3,000 laptops from Amazon.

This study aims at revising the history of knowledge management in service design organizations to discover what sources, technologies, tools, and users have been used and how knowledge management may thus help to improve consultants’ performance. Also, this study sheds light on the importance of decomposing knowledge (knowledge-leveling being said in this article) before tackling knowledge management. Moreover, this study provides a real case study investigation of knowledge management in a service design organization. Through this investigation, the authors propose their knowledge-leveling classification model and how knowledge management activities satisfy each class. Thus, the authors showcase the essentiality of knowledge leveling in knowledge management.

Dual ontological products are a physical construction and an emotional construction. Multitude of human factors must be considering when designing dual ontological products. To increase the product's impact and reach, designers should also understand the requirements of potential users. A design stage conflict exists between the emotional construction and the physical construction of a product when considering human factors. Designers find it difficult to achieve the right compromise between these constructions and hence, the balancing of the two is crucial. This research therefore contributes a novel harmonistic knowledge-based framework which makes designers aware of design stage conflicts and consequences of commitments made on human factors in the use-phase of the artefact. This approach was implemented in a machine learning based computational tool which exploits harmonistic knowledge and information collected from potential users to proactively assist, guide, and motivate product designers. This paper also presents a descriptive study for the evaluation of the framework and its implementation as a computer-based prototype tool. Results show the necessity and beneficial use of the tool for design engineering practice.

Product-service systems (PSSs) are regarded as one of the promising ways to contribute to a sustainable society. Despite the well-developed knowledge, PSS design lack of long-term perspective to treat related changes and uncertainties. To address this issue, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of sustainable PSS design for sustainability transition by integrating insight from design approach for system innovation and transition. Applicability of the proposed framework is illustrated through application to example of PSS development project for wildlife nuisance in a suburban city.

Developing autonomous functions for complex systems leads to high demands on the consideration of dependencies to external actors in the usage phase. In Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), this can be achieved by modelling operational aspects. Operational aspects are model elements and their relationships to each other. In this contribution, modelling of operational aspects with a MBSE-approach will be demonstrated exemplary on a case study related to the development of a yacht with an autonomous docking assistant. Currently modelling operational aspects is not common in the civil sector.

Open Abdomen (OA) therapy, is purposely leaving the fascial edges of the abdomen un-approximated after a laparotomy. During the OA therapy, there must be a temporary abdominal closure (TAC) device installed in the patient to achieve abdominal closure gradually without affecting its safety. However, the actual TAC devices have some gaps in terms of functionality or usability, therefore a new device is proposed. Intending to design a usable and functional technique for patients all over the world, the BioDesign Innovation Process was used. This iterative methodology focuses on healthcare needs, invention, and concept development with three main phases: Identify, Invent and Implement. At the end of these phases, the team successfully developed two new abdominal closure techniques that fill in the gaps of functionality and usability, using a simulator that realistically mimicked the physical and mechanical properties of an open abdomen. In terms of functionality, the novel techniques showed safe installation, operational security, secure grip, low invasiveness and control of intra-abdominal pressure. In terms of usability, the devices showed better results in efficiency, effectiveness and easy re-exploration than the control group.

Aircraft vehicle systems enable an aircraft to fly safely throughout a mission. Generating feasible vehicle system architectures at the aircraft concept design phase is complex. Aspects from various complex systems theories are used to provide different insights into this complexity. To address this complexity, a framework based on industrial reality that can used recursively is presented. The framework employs various design theories to harness the complexity of vehicle system design at the concept design phase of an aircraft.

Toys are children's first consumer products and while playing they acquire numerous skills, learn about their environment and socialise with other children and adults. Toys are adapted and used by clinicians as therapeutic devices because they allow them to create bonds and communicate with children. Aesthetical aspects should be considered early in the design process, especially since pre-schoolers’ views are still dominated by the appearance of artefacts, also known as, the perceptual salient characteristics. The study of emotions mediates the understanding of the relationships between a product, user and the process with which consumers set up preferences over products. Decisions taken in each design stage will influence whether therapeutic devices will be enjoyed by children. An experiment was carried out to test out pre-schoolers’ preferences on individual attributes: form, dimension, material (hardness and weight) and surface (appearance and texture). This study exposed dominant characteristic preferences and the fact that some are influenced by gender and age. Employing these findings in therapeutic devices will enable clinicians to better engage the children during therapy.

Many immersive approaches for design activities show a great potential for their specific use cases, but still overall usage of extended reality technology in product developers day-to-day work is little. The user's workflow between classical desktop work environment and its immersive counterpart is interrupted by both a data gap and an interface gap. The three-dimensional product data usually needs preparation and the user has to physically change the interface in use. The hybrid augmented reality computer workstation aims to close these gaps. A hologram of the current model is visualized next to the screen in reach of the user for intuitive inspection and spatial interactions. In this paper we present use cases for this novel immersive workstation in the CAD workflow. An explorative user study of the typical product designer`s workflow reveals the most common activities. Guided by those, eight uses cases are formulated and classified into fundamental, drafting, and modelling CAD tasks. These cases include novel hybrid augmented reality interactions derived from literature, which are assessed with respect to their applicability.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges and opportunities for higher education and one of the important areas was online education. Especially in design field, Online Problem-Based Learning has emerged as a promising method. This paper explores the potential of online-PBL and how it can be developed through a prototype approach. An action research in Indian HEI shows insights regarding the potentiality of online-PBL and application of a prototype approach to educational development activities. A concept of “educational probes” was proposed as a method to design educational program.

Visual stimuli can be useful in supporting design ideation process. However, researchers still know very little about how stimuli should be delivered to designers during the early design stage. This question is crucial to the effective use of stimuli because previous researches have proved that ill-presented stimuli can have a negative impact on design creativity. Therefore, an empirical study was conducted with the aim of exploring if and how combinational pictorial stimuli can affect designers' creative performance. Results from a total of 36 participants show that the design outcomes presented by the group exposed to combinational pictorial stimuli were more creative than those given by the group exposed to no stimuli or randomly presented pictorial stimuli. These results imply that the form of stimuli delivery can affect creative design outcomes and combinational pictorial stimuli best support design creativity among these three conditions. These findings give us a better understanding of the roles that visual stimuli play in design, which is expected to bring us important implications for both design education and design support tool development

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been established as a benchmark for design for sustainability practices. LCA provides detailed technical documents regarding a product's environmental impact, but its use is often limited to trained experts who share the knowledge with designers. Life cycle experts are highly specialized, and the typical designer faces technical barriers and time constraints in extracting information from LCA documents. This work uses knowledge transfer principles to replicate expert practices in LCA information retrieval to support designers. Life-cycle experts (n = 4) were interviewed to understand practices and challenges in information retrieval for LCA documents. Interview findings were used to create a set of guidelines for effectively navigating LCA documents and then tested in a follow-up task where designers (n = 16) annotated an electric toothbrush LCA using the identified guidelines. Results find designers can effectively extract information from LCA documents given provided guidelines, but need detailed support interpreting complex visual entities like charts and figures. This work is the first step toward enabling knowledge transfer from LCA documents and building a structured sustainability knowledge base.

The success of a company is directly linked to its economic objectives. One of the elementary objectives is to maximize profit by reducing the company's own costs in order to increase competitiveness in the market. State of the art is the function-oriented and unambiguous technical specification through the application of Geometrical Product Specifications (GPS). Linking costs related to the GPS system is currently only possible to a limited extent. This contribution presents an approach to quantify costs based on statistical tolerance analysis. The application is intended to determine the impact of a GPS-compliant specification in direct comparison to a non-compliant technical drawing by analyzing scrap rates. In this way, an assessment of the changes associated with the consistent application of the GPS system should be achieved. The results of the study show that a comparison is only possible to a certain degree due to the different characteristics. Based on this finding, an extended evaluation methodology is described.

Manufacturing process selection presents numerous challenges to designers, including product complexity, consideration of production volumes and part tolerances. This paper introduces a design support tool based on the axiomatic design model to systematically transform requirements into functions and technological capabilities. The results from an evaluation of the implemented prototype tool in the field of medical device design demonstrates its usefulness in selecting the most suitable candidate manufacturing process for a given artifact, while taking into account multiple user requirements.

Plastics are ubiquitous in our daily life due to their versatile characteristics, however, these excellent characteristics also contributed to the emergence of a gigantic garbage of floating plastics in our ocean, called the plastic soup. Within this research project we investigated the opportunities by design to cope with this wicked problem. The hypothesis is that picking small opportunities in a wicked problem can have a large impact on the related ecosystem. In addition, we also wanted to investigate how design students would deal with the problem to create larger awareness of the designers' impact and responsibility. Although there is no ideal answer to a systemic problem such as the plastic soup, intervening on systems is possible. As the characteristics of a product directly influence the way the entire value chain works, designers have a large responsibility / opportunity to influence the system. An experiment was executed with 69 design students to explore the opportunities. The resulting design concepts were discussed by experts, reasoning towards relationships, needs to elaborate the design practices, and ecodesign education in a circular economy.

Product-service systems (PSS) are one of the business models that can promote circular economy and sustainability; however, to design this kind of solution, holistic approaches must be used, integrating different areas of knowledge. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual solution based on the PSS business model to the problem of reverse logistics of coffee capsules, through the application of the Requirements Engineering method for Sustainable PSS design, with a focus on the initial phase. With an emphasis on the business model and value proposition, a conceptual solution was developed to promote the circularity of the capsule chain based on the analysis of the main stakeholders' needs. The value proposition of the PSS solution for the issue of coffee capsules was described as the “cocreation of sustainable value to stakeholders to foster the circularity of the chain”, considering consumer involvement through education and rewards in product disposal processes. The results reinforce the need to integrate critical stakeholders to add the desired value in creating a sustainable PSS solution and the need to pivot the business model during the solution development process.