Despite the rapid advancement of generative Large Language Models (LLMs), there is still limited understanding of their potential impacts on engineering design (ED). This study fills this gap by collecting the tasks LLMs can perform within ED, using a Natural Language Processing analysis of 15,355 ED research papers. The results lead to a framework of LLM tasks in design, classifying them for different functions of LLMs and ED phases. Our findings illuminate the opportunities and risks of using LLMs for design, offering a foundation for future research and application in this domain.

Extant research indicates that Chinese higher education has overlooked creativity. However, based on indirect clues, we infer that the degree of emphasis on creativity and related courses in Chinese higher education has changed. Therefore, we conducted a survey using a questionnaire to compare the creativity-related courses and adopted creativity methods in higher education between China and developed countries. The results indicate that participation rates and assessments of creativity-related courses, adopted creativity methods, and evaluations differ between China and developed countries.

Resilience is a widely studied concept that is a key objective in the design and development of sustainable systems. This is especially true for the agricultural systems critical to food production, economic viability, and sustainability of our communities, as farmers seek to meet increasing demand in the face of shocks such as climate change and natural disasters. Although there is a rich body of work examining resilience, there is limited understanding of how the concept of resilience should be tailored for agricultural systems. This study seeks to address this gap by performing a systematic literature review of 50 papers selected from SCOPUS using the PRISMA protocol. A summary of research topics and characteristics by geographical region is presented. The paper also categorizes the types of shocks studied and the corresponding response methods. Results suggest that the focus of resilience research changes by region, which may indicate that design strategies and objectives should also differ by region. Furthermore, the work identifies a need for more simulation-based quantitative research into the impact of resilience.

Adaptive buildings constitute an interdisciplinary approach for realizing the next generation of buildings in order to reduce the immense material requirements and energy demand throughout all lifecycle phases. Based on a novel cooperation between the disciplines of Architecture and Civil and Mechanical Engineering, adaptive support structures and skins are developed within the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1244. A holistic planning process is required in order to reduce the high complexity and achieve a goal-oriented procedure during the planning of such buildings and the development of integrated systems.

Part of this research is the development of new specific and the transfer of established methods from different disciplines. The experience gained during the planning of an adaptive, high-rise demonstrator building within the research project has shown that the methods for application must be provided in the form of a method toolbox to present their purpose, application time and results within the planning team. Based on the examination of existing method toolkits, this paper focuses on the development of an approach while considering context-specific requirements.

It is important to be able to compare and evaluate different solutions early in development. This paper proposes a method for structuring historical data into a data model that can support the evaluation of new design concepts. The data is contextualized by linking it to a hierarchical decomposition of existing products. Two case studies were conducted to evaluate the value of using historical data when evaluating new concepts. The cases confirm that the proposed method is useful for evaluation of new concepts.

The increasing importance of software as an essential functional provider in products and processes requires that companies master the development capabilities to continiously and quickly deliver high-quality software features. DevOps (acronym for Development and Operations) is an essential approach to these capabilities, which has so far been used predominantly in software-driven companies. This paper investigates the conditions under which DevOps can also be used in the industrial context of series manufacturing in order to be able to steadily develop and provide software features used in these environments (e.g. for monitoring and maintenance of manufacturing machines). A concept for DevOps for manufacturing systems was developed based on current best practices and the specific situation in the industrial company. The concept was then implemented and validated with experts on the basis of initial development cycles, demonstrating the usefulness of DevOps for manufacturing systems.

Digital fabrication laboratories play a role as an educational environment in which different learning activities incorporate advanced technological developments. Digital fabrication design education often involves exploratory and scaffolded processes of materialising ideas into products. However, FabLabs poses multiple challenges for pedagogy and design learning. Based on a large-scale digital fabrication course in a higher education institution, we examine whether teamwork carried out in a digital fabrication environment improves creativity. Furthermore, we analyse if teamwork affects self-assessment of learning activities involving building tangible artefacts. Finally, we examine whether the type of produced prototype affects the team's overall performance. The results allow for digital fabrication design education recommendations, including interventions intended for improving the creativity of the outcomes, team performance, and learning of different digital fabrication issues.

The purpose of this work is to compare the creative outcome in the educational context of students belonging to two different cultures, namely Singaporean and Portuguese and determine whether they respond differently to the same design brief. The participants from both samples equal 121 student designers and span from 18–25 years old. Students were randomly distributed within a uniform, standard of student performance, which allowed for fair comparison between groups. Expert judges were employed to judge the creativity of concept sketches generated during a Collaborative Sketching exercise. To evaluate the creative outcome, we employed the Consensual Assessment Technique based on a rubric-based system developed in our earlier works. The analysis of variance procedure revealed no statistically significant difference between the averaged total scores of the two groups on the appropriateness measure. However, the student designers from both samples showed statistically significant differences when provided with a baseline brief in the novelty measure. In consideration of the overall creativity scores, a relatively equivalent performance is observed across the two universities.

The part build orientation is a manufacturing variable that must be considered when designing a product to maximise AM opportunities. There are several approaches to selecting the best print direction in the scientific literature by considering different criteria. However, most of the studies are focused on specific AM technologies. It is missing a general method that evaluates a widespread number of criteria. Furthermore, such approaches expect designers establish weights for technical criteria that are too specific, especially during the preliminary design steps. Designers are familiar with criteria like cost-effectiveness, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength.

The paper presents a multi-criteria decision-making approach to optimise the build part orientation in additive manufacturing. The method considers five decision-making criteria (cost-effectiveness, rapidity, productiveness, quality and mechanical strength) and seventeen specific technical criteria. TOPSIS is the method used to optimise the build part orientation. A case study of three components exemplifies the five steps of the procedure.

In the uncertain process of product development, the developer is decisively responsible for product success. He operates in a complex environment that directly influences his synthesis and analysis activities. The context of the socio-technical system of product development has already been extensively researched and defined by a large number of factors. However, the developer is described as part of the context and not as the centre, which means that many of these factors have no interaction with the developer. For the design of methods and tools that support the developer in his activities in the development process, a summarizing understanding of the influences on and by the developer is necessary. In order to create a unified understanding of the developer at the centre of product development, a Systematic Literature Review was conducted. In this article, the procedure and findings are presented. The aim was to identify factors from the literature that significantly influence the interaction of the developer in his environment. As a result, these were documented in a model, which represents the basis for further, human-centred research in the context of product development.

External sources of inspiration can promote the discovery of new ideas as designers ideate on a design task. Data-driven techniques can increasingly enable the retrieval of inspirational stimuli based on nontext-based representations, beyond semantic features of stimuli. However, there is a lack of fundamental understanding regarding how humans evaluate similarity between non-semantic design stimuli (e.g., visual). Toward this aim, this work examines human-evaluated and computationally derived representations of visual and functional similarities of 3D-model parts. A study was conducted where participants (n=36) assessed triplet ratings of parts and categorized these parts into groups. Similarity is defined by distances within embedding spaces constructed using triplet ratings and deep-learning methods, representing human and computational representations. Distances between stimuli that are grouped together (or not) are determined to understand how various methods and criteria used to define non-text-based similarity align with perceptions of 'near' and 'far'. Distinct boundaries in computed distances separating stimuli that are 'too far' were observed, which include farther stimuli when modeling visual vs. functional attributes.

Mindset has been identified as an essential aspect of design and innovation, impacting both behaviours and performance. However, the concept of design mindset is elusive. Often design mindset is used indistinguishably from design behaviour, diminishing the complexity of the mechanisms and cognitive processes underlying design behaviour. As the initial step in researching these mechanisms, we operationalise the concept of design mindset and present the design mindset inventory (D-Mindset0) to measure it. The initial inventory centered around 16 agreement-to-value statements related to design practice. To analyse the inventory, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis based on 473 master students from different engineering disciplines participating in a course on innovation in engineering. The analysis revealed a four-factor structure with 11 final items. The four factors align with the concepts of ‘conversation with the situation,’ ‘iteration,’ ‘co-evolution of problem-solution,’ and ‘imagination.’

The advent of immersive and interactive technologies has facilitated the growth of the museum and gallery sector by offering a variety of new experiences. In the UK and China, in particular, the museum and gallery sector lies at the heart of the creative industries and makes a significant contribution to cultural growth. Both countries have recognised the impact of such technologies on the growth of the sector and have actively sought opportunities to use them for bilateral collaboration. However, the interest in immersive and interactive technologies among museum and gallery audiences remains underexplored, as do their preferences and behavioural patterns with respect to such technologies. This study discusses the key findings of user research, exploring the awareness, experiences and preferences of current museum and gallery audiences regarding (i) immersive and interactive museum and gallery experiences and (ii) the cultural exchange between the UK and China.

The electricity sector is in the midst of a structural change driven by new technologies. In Brazil, the electricity sector regulation has mechanisms to foster innovation, including investments in R&D. Recently, the regulatory agency and the industry have been calling for approaches to increase the rate at which R&D departments generate solutions that end up being adopted. As a result, novel approaches to R&D project management have entered the agenda. In this context, the objective of this paper is to characterise Agile Product Development and its application in a highly regulated sector. The paper presents a systematic literature review with the debates about Agile and new product development. Then, a case study exploring an early adoption of the Agile approach in R&D project management in the Brazilian electricity sector is presented. Results include the identification of the Agile features most frequently mentioned in the literature. Moreover, the case study explores the Agile features that were more easily absorbed in early adoption, such as iterative patterns, and discusses implementation challenges in team structure, feedback loops, and communication.

The digitalisation of the industry offers new opportunities to discuss design activities and support tools. Advancement in AI allows thinking about new Designer-AI tools interaction in the design process. The paper aims to initiate a characterisation of tools issued from researches in the application of AI in Design to rethink the division of work between Designer-AI tools. The paper is based on the literature on the concept of Levels of Automation in cognitive engineering, manufacturing and robotics, and proposes a grid of characterisation of the Level of Automation for the design process.

The use of exoskeletons promises improved ergonomics, empowerment of users and prevention of musculoskeletal disorders. However, the development process is complex and a generic development methodology that will guide and assist designers through it is missing. The goal of this paper is to describe a methodological approach that will assist the conceptual design of exoskeletons. Based on derived methodological requirements, activities 1, 2, and 3 of the VDI 2221 (Methodology for the development of technical products) are specified to adapt the generic guideline to the development process of exoskeletons. These activities include the analysis and determination of the relationship between the use case, product requirements and motions, technical functions, and design solutions. For generating a list of product requirements designers must focus on the workers’ motions and needs for a for a task-specific and personalised development. Use case specific movements are generalised by using rotational and translational basic movements that result in six degrees of freedom and from which a function structure is derived. The method is critically reviewed based on the established methodological requirements.

Understanding the viewpoint of clinicians in a healthcare setting is a vital task to comprehend the success of patients undergoing physical rehabilitation. Addressing user experience is an essential activity which designers undertake when formulating product specifications at the early stages of product design. The involvement of clinicians during the product use-phase influences the progress and achievements attained by the patients throughout their rehabilitation journey. Several clinicians (n=16) were asked to participate in a qualitative study to evaluate the performance of different personae in activities of daily living. The experiences of patients who use rehabilitation products as part of their therapy session at the clinic were evaluated. Based on this evaluation, a set of clinician requirements were formulated to reflect the overall experience when using rehabilitation products. Understanding these requirements brought about several implications to be considered during the design cycle. Through these considerations and by adopting a user-centred design approach, designers are in a better position to design innovative products targeted at providing a high-quality user experience which increases customer satisfaction.

Within the circular economy, the Product-Service System (PSS) is a key business model to slow down and dematerialise resource consumption between manufacturers or service providers and customers. Material-Service Systems (MSSs) have been proposed as a business model to develop the performance economy focusing on the relationship between material suppliers and manufacturers. The aim of this research is to introduce and develop the MSS concept and to apply it to a real-world case study. The research involved two stages. First, a modelling method is proposed to represent the flow, transformation and ownership of resources by the stakeholders in a supply chain. Second, the method is tested using steel industrial drums as a case. The results indicate that the MSS has the potential to radically transform the steel drums industry and it could work effectively with a PSS within a reuse system to recondition and reintroduce obsolete drums into the market.

The digitalization trend is finding its way more and more into product development, resulting in new frameworks to enhance product engineering. An integral element is the application of new techniques to existing data, which offers an enormous potential for time and cost savings, because duplicate work in product design and subsequent steps is avoided. The reduction of costs can be further increased through the application as early as possible in the product development process. One solution is outlined in this publication, where the source of available data is principle sketches from engineering design. These represent the basic solution for technical products in a simplified way and are often deployed in the early stages of the development process. This representation enables not only a search of similar sketches but also other fields of interest such as product optimization or the search of CAD-geometries. To utilize this data in a practical way, a procedure is presented which recognizes the symbols of the sketches and subsequently converts them into graphs. An exemplary dataset from different gearbox layouts is used to present the application opportunities by performing similarity searches with multiple input formats.

Increasing product complexity and individual customer requirements make the design of optimal product families difficult. Numerical optimization supports optimal design but must deal with the following challenges: many design variables, non-linear or discrete dependencies, and many possibilities of assigning shared components to products. Existing approaches use simplifications to alleviate those challenges. However, for use in industrial practice, they often use irrelevant commonality metrics, do not rely on the actual design variables of the product, or are unable to treat discrete variables. We present a two-level approach: (1) a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the best commonality scheme (i.e., assignment scheme of shared components to products) and (2) a particle swarm optimization (PSO) to optimize the design variables for one specific commonality scheme. It measures total cost, comprising manufacturing costs, economies of scales and complexity costs. The approach was applied to a product family consisting of five water hose boxes, each of them being subject to individual technical requirements. The results are discussed in the context of the product family design process.