In global competition, companies are continuously searching for a competitive advantage. A growing number of companies have identified the design of their products as a major success factor. The promises for companies associated with outstanding design are extremely attractive, ranging from better customer experience to higher sales growth. But even though the advantages of design seem to be compelling, companies are still having difficulties in leveraging the benefits of design.

In this paper, we want to identify the underlying challenges that explain this gap. We are especially interested in the role and challenges of design in interdisciplinary product development. Therefore, we perform a literature review that clarifies terminology, analyses research approaches and identifies challenges. We determine seven key challenges for design in interdisciplinary product development. Furthermore, we observe a limited scope of research approaches in the reviewed literature. Based on these findings, we propose three further research directions to strengthen the role of design in interdisciplinary product development in the future.

It is now becoming increasingly common for products to be designed via an interdisciplinary approach, particularly when an engineering enterprise adopts the concurrent engineering approach. Essentially, this implies that several heterogeneous sources of knowledge are simultaneously involved during the design phase of the product. The benefits often cited as a result of such an approach are increased quality and innovation, decreased time-to-market, and lower manufacturing costs. However, the approach also accentuates the problem of how to handle and manage conflicts, which frequently arise due to several factors as discussed in this paper. This paper also describes a system called Schemebuilder, which is an integrated design workbench aimed at supporting the conceptual and embodiment phases of interdisciplinary systems design, and its mechanisms for handling and resolving conflicts.