Current design theories and models predominantly focus on evaluating innovation through design solutions, using measures of novelty and usefulness as indicators of creativity. In contrast, the assessment of creative potential of design problems has attracted far less attention. To systematically explore the creative potential of design problems, a comprehensive literature review is conducted, revealing significant gaps where existing methods have yet to be applied. To address these gaps, first, an extensive database of design problems has been constructed using data collected from design patents, surveys, and questionnaires. Three distinct quantitative methods have been developed: the first for assessing novelty using SAPPhIRE model of causality, the second for assessing usefulness using usefulness indicators, and the third for assessing creative potential. The novelty method quantifies the minimum distance between a current problem and the old problems in the database, using textual similarity at different levels of SAPPhIRE abstraction. Expert evaluation of the novelty method indicates substantial agreement with experts’ intuitive notion, in addition to higher effectiveness compared to existing methods. The first two methods have then been integrated into the third method for assessing the overall creative potential of a design problem. Statistical analyses confirmed the correlation of both novelty and usefulness with creative potential, supporting findings in the literature. To demonstrate the methods, detailed case studies have been presented, illustrating the application of the methods. This systematic approach provides a robust framework for objective assessment of creativity in design problems, facilitating better prioritization and decision-making in engineering design contexts.

Additive manufacturing (AM) enables the production of innovative, lightweight component designs in the aerospace industry. However, AM processes introduce new production feasibility considerations that must be addressed during product development. Therefore, engineers require effective design support and a new design approach to fully exploit AM’s capabilities while balancing its constraints. Through an interview study involving 20 AM aerospace industry professionals from nine countries and 10 organisations, this research identifies AM design opportunities and challenges and explores the design supports used to achieve and overcome them. The findings indicate that Laser Powder Bed Fusion is a predominant AM process in aeronautical and space applications. Further, the study identifies practical and computational design supports, describes how AM design is approached during product development and provides a model outlining a general AM design approach. Key AM design challenges identified include insufficient knowledge of material properties, limited sharing of design knowledge and a lack of understanding of the relationship between AM design and post-processing requirements. Consequently, skills gaps and educational needs for Design for AM in aerospace engineering are highlighted. Additionally, the study suggests that further AM aerospace standards, enhanced computer-aided engineering software for AM and artificial intelligence integration could improve design support.

Managing cognitive load is central to designing interactive systems, particularly within augmented reality (AR) environments that impose complex and immersive demands. This study investigates two complementary approaches in parts to managing cognitive load in AR: refining interaction modalities and integrating adaptive physiological feedback. In Part 1, eye-tracking and hand-based modalities are evaluated across tasks of varying difficulty, using skin conductance responses (SCRs) as a proxy for cognitive load. Results show that while hand gestures improved task performance in simple tasks, cognitive load levels are comparable across modalities. In Part 2, an adaptive feedback system based on a signal-derived metric, cumulative SCR (CSCR), is developed to trigger short rest interventions during sustained cognitive load. Statistical analyses illustrate that rest interventions significantly reduced cumulative cognitive load, though their effect on task performance was inconclusive. These findings emphasize the trade-offs between cognitive relief and performance continuity and highlight the potential of physiologically adaptive systems in supporting cognitive-aware interaction design.

Design Science is the discipline that studies the creation of artifacts – products, services, and systems and their embedding in our physical, virtual, psychological, economic, and social environments. This editorial is a collective effort of the Design Science Journal’s editorial board members, past and present. The journal’s inaugural 2015 editorial, “Design Science: Why, What and How,” reflected the thoughts and vision of that first editorial board for the new journal and the discipline it represented. The present contribution offers the reflections of editors who served the journal in the past 10 years. The individual contributions were not primed and are presented here unedited for conformity or consistency. Differently from the 2015 editorial, there is no effort to synthesize the individual contributions, leaving the task to our readers, who can draw their own conclusions about the Design Science Journal and community accomplishments to date, and the challenges ahead.

Collaborative design (co-design) is a team effort fostered through the creative involvement of all participants in co-creative collaboration (co-creation). This new approach to design as a creative social activity heightens the need to study the interpersonal aspects of creativity. Though co-creation has become widely used in recent years, few studies focus on its dynamics, which emerge from intense interactions created by the shared subjectivities of participants in an intersubjective environment. The management and enhancement of interpersonal factors can help create this shared environment by leading the process from personal to interpersonal creativity. Some of these interpersonal factors could be measured by observing the data of biosignals that are used as social cues, particularly if studied in comparison with the data of one of the partners of the social interaction, thanks to the synchrony rate between these datasets. This synchrony of biosignals related to shared behaviours can be associated with the interactive level dynamics that occur during co-creation in team of two (pairwork). This study presents the results of an experiment where biosignal synchrony results were compared to subjective feedback regarding the interactive level to understand the dynamics of the interaction. The results suggest the possibility of using the synchrony rate measured by the Damerau- Levenshtein distance (Ld) or dynamic time warping method (DTW) to approximate the dynamics of the interactive level in co-creative pairwork. This study will contribute to our understanding of the influence of the socio-cognitive process on interactions during co-creation to improve the co-creative design process.

This paper introduces a quantitative approach to assessing the effectiveness of student–tutor crit interactions in fostering constructivist learner-centred education in design studios. Implementing the learner-centred education approach is highly encouraged in constructivist education. However, methodological gaps in the quantitative assessment of its implementation restrict comparative studies and implementation across different settings. Based on the design practices learned and taught in studio crits, a quantitative measure of learner-centred education is developed. This measure accounts for the student’s cognitive engagement in introducing new design issues and active practice in developing these issues towards a design solution. The analysis techniques combine the syntactic tracking of the first occurrence of design issues, a coding of their types and the transitions between them using the Function–Behaviour–Structure ontology. A case study is presented to demonstrate the application of this learner-centred education metric in a natural experiment involving student–tutor interactions in six design critiques throughout a single semester. Critiques alternated between two different educational media. Results indicate that this approach can determine differences in the interaction and across media. This demonstrates the potential of the approach for assessing the effectiveness of student–tutor interactions for implementing learner-centred education in studio-based education.

Successful synthesis of a new design requires balancing of trade-offs that arise from multiple competing design objectives and constraints. Early-stage design synthesis typically does not consider detailed technical constraints; a task left to late-stage mathematical design optimisation to refine an already-determined configuration. The recently developed Multi-Objective Monotonicity Analysis (MOMA) has shown that design optimisation can be used successfully in configuration redesign. This article extends the MOMA approach to early-stage design. Synthesis of an aptly named ideal design is achieved by focusing on the avoidance or reduction of trade-offs and by managing active constraints across all stages of the design process. The ideal design meets a set of formal conditions, which provide the basis for a systematic collection of corresponding design principles that can be selectively combined to create new embodiments, avoiding overly restrictive trade-offs and constraints. These principles are consistent with the decision making of experienced mechanical designers, shown here in the industrial practice for designing drug delivery devices.

Hybrid prototyping (HP) – the combination of mixed prototyping media within a single product design – has shown potential to substantially reduce process cost and fabrication time. However, previous work has not considered how HP processes and fabrication should be aligned with designer intent or activity needs, how these may change the realised savings or good practice guidance for successful implementation. This work proposes three approaches for HP with Lego and additive manufacturing, targeted towards enabling mixed fidelity for prototype flexibility, parallelisation for rapid fabrication and component reuse to minimise material waste. It then establishes good practice guidance and proposes a HP method that accounts for practical and process constraints, then implemented through an automated hybridisation tool. Approaches are compared through a simulation study and a case study to establish relative benefit. Results show potential time and material savings of 56% and 76%, respectively, depending on the approach chosen, demonstrating the substantial and practical scope for savings that HP provides.

This article investigates “livingness” at the convergence of design, human–computer interaction (HCI) and synthetic biology, emphasising the evolving role of materialism. It examines living artefacts – objects designed with life-like qualities that utilise natural, engineered or programmable materials. The study thoroughly reviews theoretical underpinnings, highlighting new materialism’s focus on the agency of matter and HCI’s material turn, underscoring the value of physical interaction with digital systems. It also discusses recent advancements in living organisms as integral elements in design, aimed at reducing environmental impact and creating new user experiences. Through a systematic literature review and an in-depth analysis of case studies, the article proposes an extended definition of “livingness” across the three disciplines, advancing the understanding of the functions of living artefacts, how life-like capabilities can be integrated into them, and the implications for regenerative design. The findings invite a reimagined relationship between humans, materials and technology, fostering sustainable and interactive design practices.

Maximising creativity requires an enriched imagination that uses all five senses. This study explored the effects of a reduced visual–auditory multisensory stimuli environment on creativity. Nineteen participants took the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) under the nine decreased visual–auditory multisensory stimuli conditions. Fluency and originality were evaluated as a part of the creativity assessment. The number of ideas from the AUT determined the fluency level, and the three judges’ evaluations determined originality. A study on associative conceptual network analysis explored the word associations of selected nouns from the AUT under nine reduced visual–auditory multisensory stimuli experimental conditions, revealing outdegree centrality scores to evaluate creative potential. The results suggest that the decreasing visual stimuli inhibit fluency whereas auditory stimuli do not, and that originality is enhanced when stimuli are reduced, whether visual or auditory, unless there is a notable divergence between the visual and auditory conditions. These results highlight the importance of perceptual focus and cognitive load regulation in fostering creative potential.

Disability and inclusivity are progressive topics that have evolved in response to societal experiences, as evidenced by the social model of disability, which has been endorsed as a replacement for the conventional individual model of disability. However, many still regard disability as an individual rather than an environmental problem, which fosters stigmatization of people with disabilities. Addressing this requires deeper knowledge to inform experience design that raises awareness of disability and the importance of social inclusion. The authors conducted a co-design experiment focusing on how to fill the communication gap between deaf and hearing people. Six teams, each comprising one deaf and two hearing participants, were observed to identify the salient characteristics of two contrastive approaches: LESS, a deaf-oriented audio environment with decreased audio stimuli, and MORE, a hearing-oriented audio environment with no decreased auditory stimuli. The results were cross-analyzing quantitative and qualitative data with interaction mapping. The analysis found that the LESS approach helps people feel no barriers, while the MORE approach enables them to challenge prior understandings of the issue. This study will contribute to designing an experience-based awareness-raising activity, suggesting where the gap exists and how it should be filled in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Complete exploration of design spaces is often computationally prohibitive. Classical search methods offer a solution but are limited by challenges like local optima and an inability to traverse dislocated design spaces. Quantum computing (QC) offers a potential solution by leveraging quantum phenomena to achieve computational speed-ups. However, the practical capability of current QC platforms to deliver these advantages remains unclear. To investigate this, we apply and compare two quantum approaches – the Gate-Based Grover’s algorithm and quantum annealing (QA) – to a generic tile placement problem. We benchmark their performance on real quantum hardware (IBM and D-Wave, respectively) against a classical brute-force search. QA on D-Wave’s hardware successfully produced usable results, significantly outperforming a classical brute-force approach (0.137 s vs 14.8 s) at the largest scale tested. Conversely, Grover’s algorithm on IBM’s gate-based hardware was dominated by noise and failed to yield solutions. While successful, the QA results exhibited a hardware-induced bias, where equally optimal solutions were not returned with the same probability (coefficient of variation: 0.248–0.463). These findings suggest that for near-term engineering applications, QA shows more immediate promise than current gate-based systems. This study’s contribution is a direct comparison of two physically implemented quantum approaches, offering practical insights, reformulation examples and clear recommendations on the utilisation of QC in engineering design.

Excellent products often contain profound cultural connotations. To improve the quality of cultural products, it is important to study how typical cultural carriers can be more promptly and efficiently identified and incorporated into products through a detailed and easy-to-use design process. In this article, we propose an approach from three different levels to assist designers in incorporating cultural features into products, including: (1) the integrated framework of the composition and division of cultural carriers, (2) the extraction and translation model from cultural carriers, cultural elements to cultural features and (3) the cultural product design process. The proposed approach was applied in a large and complex cultural product case, that is, inter-city train design. The evaluation of the recognition of culture features indicated that the approach contributed to conferring culture on products through thoughtful design and could ensure that the product schemes reflect cultural features as well as interesting cultural connotations.

Speculative design is widely used in research contexts across multiple disciplines, emphasising problem-finding over problem-solving, and involves methods for exploring possibilities that challenge ingrained assumptions. This systematic literature review analyses speculative design methods used in 52 studies within disciplines such as human–computer interaction, fashion, urban planning, and healthcare, among other fields. It presents results about the common phases and methods of speculative design that are utilised in these studies. It identifies and characterises four core phases that appear to be common within speculative design processes, namely select, explore, transform, and provoke. It shares examples of how these phases are used to achieve the goals of speculative design. The discussion section considers the process of speculative design, leading to the synthesis of a framework that visually and conceptually organises these findings to facilitate their comprehension and application. This paper contributes to the understanding of speculative design by providing a clear process that addresses gaps in its theoretical and methodological foundations.

This research examines whether a machine, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), can be creative by comparing design solutions for a practical competition – a light fixture for a pediatric waiting room – among AI, collaboration efforts and a human designer. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific workers observed the design solutions throughout the design process, from sketches ($ S $) to three-dimensional renderings ($ 3D $) to fully developed models in virtual waiting rooms ($ VR $). Using the well-established Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS), the workers rated each design solution in three distinctive stages – $ S $, $ 3D $ and $ VR $ – on three criteria – novelty (freshness or newness), resolution (relevance and logic) and style (craftsmanship and desirability). Despite some demographic discrepancies, the workers expressed general senses of happiness and calmness, resonating with the competition’s requirements. Statistical results of CPSS ratings revealed that while AI excelled in style for $ 3D $, the human designer outperformed in novelty for both $ S $ and $ VR $. Collaboration efforts surprisingly finished last. Such findings challenge current assumptions of AI’s creative ability in design research and highlight the need to be agile in the age of disruptive technologies. This research also offers guidance for product and interior designers and educators on thoughtfully integrating AI into the design process.

Changing environmental, societal, and business conditions shift the priority given to the ‘most valuable’ design solutions to be developed, which risks causing rework and mistakes during the development process. To maintain consistency among changes in what ‘value’ means in evolving business contexts, this paper presents a method – value-driven model-based systems engineering (VD-MBSE) – implemented in a software tool (named Club Design). The method is demonstrated through a case study related to aerospace electrification, highlighting its ability to maintain consistency during the iterations between business development and the design of technical solutions.

This paper introduces Setting-Driven Design (SDD) and supporting tool – the Behaviour Setting Canvas (BSC) – which together address a critical gap in behavioural design by shifting the focus from individual behaviour to the broader context in which behaviour occurs. Rooted in behaviour setting theory, SDD is a powerful approach to behavioural design that offers an end-to-end structure for understanding and intervening in a behavioural design challenge. The process comprises three iterative phases: scoping the behavioural challenge, understanding the setting and intervention development. The process structure revolves around the BSC, a tool for mapping key contextual elements such as roles, motives, norms and routines. While SDD is particularly effective for behaviour change interventions, its utility extends to other design challenges, including introducing new products, shifting social norms and enhancing existing systems where behaviour remains constant. The approach integrates a theory of change to guide intervention development, prototyping and evaluation, ensuring alignment with behavioural objectives and contextual realities. A case study on handwashing in low-income Tanzanian households illustrates the method’s utility, culminating in the creation of Tab Soap, a single-use, biodegradable soap designed to improve hygiene behaviours. The study demonstrates how SDD facilitates insight generation and iterative refinement and complements user-centred design. SDD advances behavioural design by combining theoretical rigour with practical application, offering a scalable and adaptable framework for addressing complex design challenges across diverse fields.

VR sketching tools have matured to a practical level, enabling use across various 3D design disciplines. Studies into VR sketching in design report beneficial affordances but are based on brief testing of tools in simulated tasks. Consequently, there is a knowledge deficit in understanding how to effectively integrate VR sketching into design projects. We address this gap with a case study on the sustained use of VR sketching in 10 automotive concept design projects over 10 months. In analysing designers’ logbooks, which captured design development, and post-study reflections, we show how the affordances of VR sketching outlined in literature manifest in practice. Specifically, we show how and when designers can exploit the precedence of 3D geometry embodied in VR sketches to advance the design process in terms of several dimensions of design fidelity. We highlight where process advantages are realised through (1) increased spatial fidelity, reducing the time required to iterate 2D sketches, (2) operational fidelity supporting dynamic testing of concept functionality via animation and (3) environmental fidelity supporting contextualising components and storytelling. As such, our findings highlight how and when practitioners can realise the comparative benefits of VR sketching alongside traditional sketching and 3d modelling during the concept design process.

Within the broad context of design research, joint attention within co-creation represents a critical component, linking cognitive actors through dynamic interactions. This study introduces a novel approach employing deep learning algorithms to objectively quantify joint attention, offering a significant advancement over traditional subjective methods. We developed an optimized deep learning algorithm, YOLO-TP, to identify participants’ engagement in design workshops accurately. Our research methodology involved video recording of design workshops and subsequent analysis using the YOLO-TP algorithm to track and measure joint attention instances. Key findings demonstrate that the algorithm effectively quantifies joint attention with high reliability and correlates well with known measures of intersubjectivity and co-creation effectiveness. This approach not only provides a more objective measure of joint attention but also allows for the real-time analysis of collaborative interactions. The implications of this study are profound, suggesting that the integration of automated human activity recognition in co-creation can significantly enhance the understanding and facilitation of collaborative design processes, potentially leading to more effective design outcomes.

Limited research has explored the delivery of sustainable design in higher education globally. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate educational practices on the topic. Through an online survey, we investigated numerous aspects of units of study exposing topics related to sustainable design with a focus on contents, teaching methods and educational objectives. The survey was accessed by almost 400 educators in the field of sustainable design. The data show that a variety of teaching methods are used, with a critical role played by project-based learning in addition to traditional lectures. Most respondents rated all investigated intended learning outcomes as relevant or very relevant. In terms of contents and methods treated by the respondents, product eco-design and design for X are the most frequently taught methods. Educational approaches and teaching objectives are poorly affected by the discipline of the degree in which units of study are taught. In terms of contents, design degrees include approaches to sustainable design at the spatio-social level more frequently than engineering degrees do.