As design research expands its horizon, there has been a recent rise in studies on nontraditional designers. Previous studies have noted the positive effect of diversity in generating ideas. Among different sources of influence, peers outside the design team have been noted for their positive impact on the design process, yet the research on this topic is still in its early stages. Using qualitative data from 40 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the American and Finnish food and beverage industries, the current study examines their interactions with other SMEs, shedding light on the influence of peers on creating new design solutions. The findings suggest that peer companies can act as a frequent and impactful source of inspiration for product design ideas. The most prevalent forms of interaction were co-creating products, sharing information, and sharing ingredients. Furthermore, the interactions were voluntary, organic, and improvisational in nature, and physical proximity or previous connections often initiated the interactions. Taken together, a great number of peer influences contributed towards creative new solutions.

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.

With regard to the currently perceptible technological, social and economic change, also known as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” or “Internet of Things”, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular are confronted with various obstacles in their attempt of keeping pace. For example, there is a lack of orientation of which I4.0 technology is suitable for a target-oriented application. Furthermore, the actual or potential effects of I4.0 can only be estimated insufficiently and SMEs are at a disadvantage compared to large companies due to lower monetary and personnel capacities. In this publication these obstacles on the way to become an I4.0 company are taken up and the core elements of a methodical solution approach in the form of the “Potential Model” are explained in detail. Thereby the Potential Model is intended to support SMES at the rough-quantitative evaluation of I4.0 and the development of I4.0 implementation strategies with minimal monetary and time-related efforts needed.

The development of complex technical systems is characterized by a large number of system elements as well as their interactions. With regard to requirements management, many requirements have to be considered, which can have different relations to each other. If these requirements are used as basis for criteria in the decision making process, these relations must also be considered in the multi-criteria evaluation of product alternatives. Therefore, a computer-aided approach is presented in this paper, which allows the systematic modeling of requirement interactions focusing on multi-criteria decision making. For this purpose, basic relation types are identified, which are used to model submatrices in order to derive the Requirement Relation Matrix (RRM). Matrix-based as well as graph-based visualization methods are used for the RRM in order to improve the alternatives with the knowledge about the relational linkage. In addition, the effects of changes in requirements can be transferred to the decision making process. The approach is exemplarily applied to the extension of a test laboratory by a test bench.

The aim of this paper is to show to how far VR technology can help in the implementation of methods in product development. First, an overview of the product development approach and VR technology is given. Then, an evaluation scheme is developed to examine product development methods for their VR suitability. Finally, the results are evaluated and recommendations for future research are given.

Requirements engineering and requirements management are essential sub-processes of product development and are an integrated part of virtually all product development models and industrial process descriptions. Proprietary and context specific processes for working with requirements are used in industrial design practice. However, these are not appropriately reflected in existing process models for product development. Existing standards describe the content and generation of requirements documents but not their integration in the product development process.

The study is based on a retrospective analysis of a set of representative real-world product development projects from automotive industry and rail industry. Comparing the processes downstream the milestone “release of PRD”, it was found that subsequent processes to manage requirements and specifications do not differ much with regard to industrial context. Based on this, a model for the product requirements specification (PRS) process is proposed which addresses the gap.

As product, production systems and material strongly influence each other, an integrated view on these domains offers huge potentials during development in order to adjust characteristics being mutually dependent. Considering manufacturing aspects within the design process certainly constitute a widespread approach to make sure that the products can be produced to predefined costs and quality.

As product characteristics are realised through material characteristics and manufacturing processes, material aspects need to be integrated into this view. Moreover, different geometries have to be assembled in order to create particular structures, why joints devote a special attention.

For this reason, a definition approach that integrates product, production systems, material plus joints and considers the ecological performance apart from the regular technical and economic aspects offers a huge potential for successful future solutions. This paper reviews relevant development approaches as well as supporting IT tools in the different domains. As a result, an extendedly integrated view is introduced and a method that supports the integrated selection of solutions regarding a technical, economic and ecological performance is introduced.

This research work presents a methodological support for the specification of complex products. This is achieved by developing a specification structure in a MBSE environment. The new method draws on success factors of complex product specification, principles of MBSE and the explanatory model of PGE – Product Generation Engineering. For evaluation, the method is applied within a student development project. A high applicability and the realization of novel synergies for coping with continuously increasing product complexity is demonstrated.

Interactions of users with AI powered solutions (AIPS) have the potential to affect collective behaviours and amplify unanticipated outcomes. Product developers, organisations, and companies are increasingly being expected to take responsibility for the unanticipated outcomes of their products. In this paper we explore a proactive approach to prototyping AIPS-user interactions using Social Virtual Reality (SVR) environments that allows for the anticipation of potential outcomes. We contend that doing so would limit the detrimental effect outcomes could have on product developers' resources and reputation

In industry, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is an established quality tool for minimizing development risks in systems, products and processes. Nevertheless, the presented use case shows that the application of the FMEA method in the development of Product-Service Systems in a SME requires modifications to ensure that the special character of PSS is appropriately included and that risks can be adequately assessed and prioritized.

Combinatorial Design such as configuration design, design optioneering, component selection, and generative design, is common across engineering. Generating solutions for a combinatorial design task often involves the application of classical computing solvers that can either map or navigate design spaces. However, it has been observed that classical computing resource power-law scales with many design space models. This observation suggests classical computing may not be capable of modelling our future design space needs.

To meet future design space modelling needs, this paper examines quantum computing and the characteristics that enables its resources to scale polynomially with design space size. The paper then continues to present a combinatorial design problem that is subsequently represented, constrained and solved by quantum computing. The results of which are the derivation of an initial set of circuits that represent design space constraints. The study shows the game-changing possibilities of quantum computing as an engineering design tool and is the start of an exciting new journey for design research.

Most services and products are designed in response to the needs, desires or expectations of humans. A variety of methodologies grouped by the term Human-Centred Design (HCD) have been deployed to formalise and improve this process, ranging from user-centred to participatory practices. However, the approaches’ consideration is primarily limited to individuals in their respective space and time.

To examine these system boundaries in detail and address potentials for adaptation, this paper reviews dominant HCD methodologies, categorises them and highlights their respective characteristics. Further, concepts and methodologies from related fields are studied for potential contributions to HCD. This results in a proposed re-definition of the system boundaries of HCD by integrating spatio-temporal impacts on humans through an extended social, environmental and economic scope.

The different studied approaches and varying impact assessments are exemplarily applied to the case study of urban mobility, in particular human-centred, scenario-based design approaches. However, the described methods and concepts are kept generic to ensure the applicability across various domains of design practice.

This paper presents the re-design approach of an urban motorcycle helmet to prevent users bypassing the strap fastening system. Related studies show that although a full-face helmet provides the maximum protection to a rider, in practice, full-face helmeted riders in urban traffic tend to improperly fasten it. On that notion, the design goal was to conceive a helmet that combines the advantages of different helmet types while responding to urban driving needs. During design ideation possible solutions were examined focusing on different ways of accessing and fixating the helmet on a rider’s head, without using a strap fastening system. Preliminary concept development produced three design concepts, that were evaluated using two sets of prototypes: (a) the 3D printing method under a 1:2 scale was used to detect any design faults, while the 3D modeled concepts were evaluated in four different crash impacts regarding total deformation and von-Mises stress, and (b) 1:1 models of the three concepts were used by experienced riders to assess possible usability issues during helmet placement/removal. Results of the two-phase evaluation of the three concepts and design issues for further development of them are discussed.

This paper examines the immediate effects of group methods in facilitating remote team collaboration. We recruited seven teams with prior experience working together. All teams completed two current, complex, and open-ended design challenges using remote tools. We examined design activities before and after teams were given a design method intervention. The interventions were a Brainstorming Method to promote divergent thinking and the Five-Whys method to promote analytical thinking. Using OpenFace, we observed changes in emotion by examining facial expressions. We found that the brainstorming intervention did not have a change in ideation performance and the problem analysis intervention had a decrease in ideation performance. Teams used digital media to facilitate communication but were constrained by the media's tools. Our results can inform teams in organizations interested in promoting divergent thinking to not expect immediate improvements in ideation performance following the introduction of a design method. Future research is required to identify relevant abilities and social skills needed to facilitate remote ideation through design methods.

Standards are an important source of knowledge in product development. Due to the increasing digitization of the product development process, standard development organizations aim to develop machine-actionable standards that automatically enforce operations in output devices. However, the current representation format in PDF or XML does not meet the requirements of machine-actionable standards. This paper examines existing approaches towards the representation of XML data in knowledge graphs and their transferability towards the domain of digital standards. Based on these approaches, the paper aims to develop and validate a concept for transferring standard content from XML format to a graph-based representation, using the example of formulas. For this purpose, a concept for the automatic identification, extraction and modeling of formulas will be presented. Afterwards, the concept is validated using the example of DIN ISO 281 whereas a chatbot application serves as conversational user interface. It is proven, that knowledge graphs are suitable for the representation of machine-actionable standard content. Future work will investigate the abstraction towards a general approach as well as further information objects of standards.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), like autonomous vehicles, are intelligent and networked. The development of such systems and its components requires interdisciplinary cooperation between different stakeholders. A lack of system understanding between stakeholders can lead to unidentified and unresolved security threats & safety hazards in early engineering phases, resulting in high costs in product development and potentially compromises compliance with the safety of CPS.

Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) improves the system understanding between stakeholders by using models.

However, MBSE approaches only partially address security threats & safety hazards. In particular, their integrative consideration is not taken into account.

Established security & safety approaches are either only applicable to specific disciplines or only partially consider security threats & safety hazards.

In the context of this paper we present a method for the resolution of safety relevant security threats in the system architecture design phase using design patterns.

We illustrate our approach with the example of the automotive sector.

Finally, we present an evaluation of the method, based on an 8 week project with 67 master students.

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.

The importance of prototyping is unanimous with numerous studies into the media, types, roles and properties of prototypes. However, no recent papers have sought to examine and characterise industry practice and if and how this has changed since the early 2000s.

To address this, a snapshot of industrial prototyping practice with particular attention to the what, when, why, how, and by whom is reported. The study involved five small-medium sized design companies based in the South-West of the UK and validation of the findings by two independent practitioners.

The snapshot revealed that 3D printing and virtual prototyping tools have reached widespread adoption in SMEs,that their design processes are highly agile and iterative and are difficult to fit to any extant design process model.

Rather, the approaches appear to implicitly comprise of three levels of design convergence: macro, meso, and micro, which correspond to finer/more detailed changes.

The results also reveal the frequent transitions between digital and physical media and the need to manage these transitions to ensure the product representations in different media are appropriately up-to-date.

In product development, user-scenarios are a way of tailoring requirements to defined customer groups. Furthermore, a product design often involves multiple conflicting objectives that are analyzed within an iterative process. The models typically used for the analysis often do not accurately reflect the real-world representation. This can be alleviated by finding robust product designs. While usually uncertainties due to manufacturing tolerances are investigated, we additionally consider uncertainties in the user-scenario. Therefore, we present a robustness evaluation in a multi-objective numerical optimization in product development. For this, we consider manufacturing tolerances using an adjusted Latin Hypercube Sampling as well as deviations in the user-scenario by means of a Gaussian distribution. In the case study, we present the robust development of a customer specific coffee machine, where we show the robustness evaluation and the impact of the proposed adjustments. The advantage of the presented process is a product design tailored to the customer's requirements under specified uncertainties. In addition, this enables a time benefit in the product development due to the automated analysis used in the optimization.

The extent to which designers can understand users often determines the quality of design outcomes. A deep understanding of users allows the designers to focus on the right problem and make optimal design decisions, which encouraged designers to empathize with users. However, the current imagination-based empathizing strategy appears to be too susceptible to their previous experience and knowledge, which has been questioned concerning effectiveness and accuracy. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) technology provides an opportunity for designers to gain experience-driven empathy by immersing them in a virtual environment that mimics the users' surroundings as if they are seeing the world from users' eyes. While abundant studies covered empathy VR and empathy for design, limited attention has been paid to the chance of bringing VR, empathy, and design research together. Addressing this gap, this study explored literature across domains, identified major concerns about this approach, synthesized the evidence, and discussed the feasibility and validity of the VR-based empathic design research approach.