In the product development process, digital support continues to advance. Some work steps during product development are still carried out without assistance. Sketch creation is one of these. Therefore, the content created here is rarely documented due to the effort required for digital transformation. An alternative can be sketching in virtual reality. This article explores whether 3D sketching in VR enables faster sketching and can offer the basic features of hand-drawn sketches. To verify this, a tool for 3D sketching was developed. 27 test subjects were asked to solve one out of two different design tasks using this tool. The experiments were evaluated using video coding to identify the subjects actions. The created solutions have been analyzed about quality. The study showed initial indications that sketching in VR generally enables faster processing while maintaining the same solution quality.

Creativity is very important for designers, and methods to stimulate designers' creativity are the long-term focus of art design education. The senses are an important channel for designers to receive information and define core issues. Stimulating the designer's senses can help enhance their perception and creativity, and is of great benefit for the quality and efficiency of the design outcome. Today's interactive media technology provides more possibilities and advantages for designers' perception and sensation. The purpose of this research is to explore a way to stimulate the designer's senses through the use of interactive media, thereby improving the designer's design thinking and creativity, and providing designers with innovative design support. By means of interactive ground projection and experiments, and discussion of the advantages of interactive media to stimulate designers' senses, this research proposes innovations in art design educational media, which is valuable for the training and learning of designers and the development of virtual education environment in the future.

As a result of the increasing challenges in the field of lightweight constructions, the demand for efficient joining technologies is continuously rising. For this purpose, cold forming processes offer an environmental friendly and fast alternative to established joining methods (e.g. welding). However, to ensure a high reliability, not only the selection of an appropriate procedure, but also the dimensioning of the individual joint is essential. While product designers can rely on a wide range of design principles for thermal processes, the dimensioning and evaluation of mechanical joining processes is mainly based on expert knowledge and a few experimental tests. Although few studies already investigated the numerical analysis of mechanical joints, an approach for the sustainable and consistent optimization of the strength and reliability of joining connections for varying use-cases is not available yet. Motivated by this lack, this paper presents an approach for the automated transfer of information within the process chain and the data-based analysis of mechanical joints by using clinching as an example. Therefore, the CRISP-DM reference model is used for the systematic data mining.

Social media influencers (SMI) are gaining interest and many are studying their influence on the online audience, little is known about the role played by them in offline teams. One such attempt to study the effect of influencers in co-design team is presented in this paper, where individuals who are confident in their abilities drive the team process. Thus, self-efficacy is considered for determining influencer behaviour. Results expose the relationship between self-efficacy and influencer status on the design process, besides briefly highlighting the effects on above-average teams.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) enables new ways to envision how computer tools will aid, work with, and even guide human teams. This paper explores this new paradigm of design by considering emerging variations of AI-Human collaboration: AI used as a design tool versus AI employed as a guide to human problem solvers, and AI agents which only react to their human counterparts versus AI agents which proactively identify and address needs. The different combinations can be mapped onto a 2×2 AI-Human Teaming Matrix which isolates and highlights these different AI capabilities in teaming. The paper introduces the matrix and its quadrants, illustrating these different AI agents and their application and impact, and then provides a road map to researching and developing effective AI team collaborators.

The negative social and environmental impacts of the fashion industry refer to a global industry, with its ubiquitous supply chains driven by big brands that determine what to produce, where to produce, and at what prices to sell. Do we want to continue to keep fashion as a beautiful artifact? If so, we need to consider how resources are deployed. Accelerating climate change is looming, portending an uncertain and damaging future. Can fashion be sustainable? Why is sustainability in fashion seen as an oxymoron? Can a return to slow fashion accompany digital towards a sustainable future?

Prototyping is an essential activity in product development, but novice designers lack awareness and purpose when they prototype. To foster prototyping mindsets in novice designers, we introduce a prototyping support tool that structures prototyping activities. This paper outlines the Prototyping Planner's development, evolution, and evaluation by 125 novice designers. The majority of novice designers’ experienced that the Prototyping Planner helped them create purposeful prototypes and evaluate results from prototyping.

Immersive visualisations introduce new possibilities for experiencing design, and as such for presenting information. To date, studies in design have focused mostly on immersive visualisations supporting product decisions. However, little attention has been paid to information presentation, e.g. in design reviews, for decisions in the boardroom, and/or for client presentations. This study with industry practitioners identifies information presentation practices and challenges, develops an immersive visualisation prototype, and explores opportunities for the use of immersive visualisations.

Successful companies spend many of their resources in the initiation and realisation of innovation projects, which might be successful at the market. Especially in the early phase of these projects, there is a high degree of uncertainty and therefore, product profiles established themselves as methodological support for product developers. However, it is not possible to give developers a straight and always equal process to follow for developing these product profiles. Based on this problem, this contribution investigates context-independent process steps to develop promising product profiles. Thus, this work provides a possible reference process to develop product profiles to support product developers in the early stage of innovation projects. Therefore, 631 process steps of 16 innovation projects were analysed and 100 process steps were derived from literature. Based on an expert workshop, 48 of these process steps were identified as relevant to consider in a context-independent reference process model. In a further empirical Live-Lab study, process patterns were investigated and the usability and relevance of the process steps were evaluated as positive.

Additive manufacturing (AM), which was first applied for rapid prototyping, is now becoming a real option for small-batch production of final products. Further expansion of AM is closely correlated to production costs. AM can only become competitive to traditional manufacturing methods if a product is designed for AM already from the beginning as it is an expensive technology that should only be applied if it adds enough value to the product. The aim of this paper is to increase cost awareness in the conceptual design phase and to support product developers in doing AM cost estimation and process selection. The proposed model integrates design for AM and costs calculation. The input data to the process is preliminary design and design requirements. The main contribution of this paper is the multi-criteria AM function, which enables concurrent consideration of different technical and economical criteria. The multi-criteria AM function helps to compare how AM processing and product design parameters influence the product cost. The holistic overview of different options increases the solution space and enables product optimization in several iterations.

Companies are under increasing pressure from global competition while at the same they need to offer flexible products to meet individual customer requirements. Therefore, modularised capital goods are designed and manufactured to meet both challenges. This paper presents an approach to identify necessary changes in the production process and summarises the changes in the automotive and aerospace industries due to modularisation. Three key findings are identified: increased outsourcing potential, production in a value creation network with specialised manufacturers and joint investments.

The advent of additive manufacturing (AM) in recent years have had a significant impact on the design process. Because of new manufacturing technology, a new area of research emerged – Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) with newly developed design support methods and tools. This paper looks into the current status of the field regarding the conceptual design of AM products, with the focus on how literature sources treat design heuristics and design principles in the context of DfAM. To answer the research question, a systematic literature review was conducted. The results are analysed, compared and discussed on three main points: the definition of the design heuristics and the design principles, level of support they provide, as well as where and how they are used inside the design process. The paper highlights the similarities and differences between design heuristics and design principles in the context of DfAM.

In recent years, rapid technical progress has led to additive manufacturing achieving a high degree of technological maturity that enables a broad range of applications. This is reinforced in particular by the advantages of the technology, such as the production of complex components, smaller quantities and fast reaction times. However, a lack of knowledge of the various process techniques, such as insufficient potential assessment, specific design guidelines or even of process restrictions, often lead to different errors.

This paper presents a methodological approach to support designers in the manufacturing process selection of specific parts at an early stage of product development. In a four-stage procedure, potential part candidates are first identified and part classes formed on the basis of characteristics. Building on this, AM thinking is to be stimulated, for example, with the aid of design guidelines. A comparison between conventionally and additively manufactured parts can be made using a simplified cost model. The results are incorporated into a process model that supports companies in the systematic selection of manufacturing processes.

In order to operate in line with the circular economy (CE) concept, companies and other stakeholders need to work together to enable the circulation and cascading of resources. Although the need for proactive stakeholder management is a common theme in recent work on CE, little work has been dedicated to creating prescriptive methods for the co-design of CE value chains (CEVCs) focusing on selecting strategic partners, when to engage them and in what capacity. Following calls to connect the emerging CE literature with literature from existing bodies of knowledge, this paper explores the theoretical foundations of a CEVCs co-design method. Specifically, this paper explores resource-base view (RBV); resource dependency theory (RDT); and actor-network theory (ANT), and synthesises an outline for the co-design process of CEVCs. Reflections on the process link it to the extant co-design literature and explain how the process can be used for method and tool development.

In the digital era, products’ forms do not necessarily follow their function. Design fixation may happen when a designer attempts to generate diverse concepts. New design heuristics for digital design were extracted to support designers in the early conceptual design stage. Ten design heuristics were extracted from 998 RedDot award-winning concept designs (2013-2017) through a five-step process. It was preliminarily tested by four practitioners and proved to have positively influenced their conceptual design.

One of the arguments against an increased use of repair is that, due to the constantly growing progress, an often already outdated component would be restored. However, refurbishment also allows a component to be modified in order to upgrade it to the state of the art or to adapt it to changed requirements. Many existing approaches regarding Design for Upgradeability are based on a modular product architecture. In these approaches, however, only the upgradeability of a product is considered through the exchange of components. Nevertheless, the exchange and improvement of individual component regions within a refurbishment has already been successfully carried out using additive processes. In this paper, a general method is presented to support the reengineering process, which is necessary to refurbish and upgrade a damaged component. In order to identify which areas can be replaced in the closed system of a component, the systematics of the modular product architecture are used. This allows dependencies between functions and component regions to be identified. Thus, it possible to determine which functions can be integrated into the intended component.

Extending the lifespan of products and parts is seen as a solution in the transition towards a circular economy. There are many proposed design approaches argued to facilitate this. However, extending the lifespan of products and parts is not always desirable, and product developers should instead strive to design for a specific longevity; the product's optimal lifetime. The latter in turn depends on many various contextual factors, and this paper has identified the three main contextual factors as; the user, the business, and the resource efficiency. Considering these three appropriately can help product developers to define their product's optimal lifetime. Altogether, these components promote the mindset of Design for Longevity. Specifically, as extracted from this paper: “Design for Longevity aims at designing products with an optimal lifetime, where optimal means taking the user, the business and the resource efficiency perspectives into account when designing the life of a product”. A Design for Longevity framework is proposed and evaluated in this paper, and it is concluded that the proposed Design for Longevity framework can support product developers to implement the Design for Longevity mindset.

The paper presents the original integration of ICT tools and e-learning platform into an infrastructure to support Project-based learning for a design class that is geographically distributed across different countries. 30 Mechanical Engineering students from 4 European countries tested the infrastructure prototype for the development of an innovative solution in the field of white goods. The results produced evidence about the suitability of the proposal together with strong and weak points of the infrastructure, that can support further development and adaptation into different contexts.

In practical design work, a designer needs to consider the feasibility of a part for a manufacturing using additive manufacturing (AM) instead of conventional manufacturing (CM) technology. Traditionally and by default parts are assumed to be manufactured using CM and using AM as an alternative need to be justified. AM is currently often a more expensive manufacturing method than CM, but its employment can be justified due to number of reasons: improved part features, faster manufacturing time and lower cost. Improved part features means usually reduced mass or complex shape. However, in low volume production lower manufacturing time and lower part cost may rise to the most important characteristics.

In this paper, we present a practical feasibility model, which analyses the added value of using AM for manufacturing. The approach is demonstrated in the paper on four specific parts. They represent real industrial design tasks that are ordered from an engineering office company. These parts were manufactured by Selective Laser Meting (SLM) technology and the original design done for conventional manufacturing is also presented and used for comparison purpose.

Integrated Natural Resource and Conservation Development (INRCD) Projects is an umbrella term for a variety of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), a concept first introduced by the World Wide Fund for Nature in the mid 1980s to target practice-oriented efforts in developing countries; and Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) research and development projects introduced as adaptive management for fisheries, wildlife, forest, and rangeland to target analysis-oriented efforts in developing and developed countries. Both efforts seek to balance economic development and natural resource conservation. This paper reviews the literature over the past four decades in an attempt to determine which planning and execution methods lead to greater success. A thematic analysis revealed three broad areas of importance: community inclusion and income diversification, inadequate training and management, and inability to properly quantify data. A systems design optimization approach for such projects is advocated to support project decision making in these areas of importance.