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.

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 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.

Studies of supplier involvement in product development have revealed potential benefits including faster time to market, reduced cost and increased quality. However, existing literature has mainly focused on the customer's perspective on advantages, disadvantages and factors to be considered when involving suppliers in product development. This paper addresses the supplier's perspective by answering following research question: How do challenges that originate from involvement in customer's product development affect a supplier? The question is answered through a single case study at a supplier that develops and manufacture products primary used in capital goods. Thirteen challenges are identified, classified as being internal or external, and categorised into five areas: (A) Customer requirements, (B) Information exchange between customer and supplier, (C) Product variety management, (D) Design- manufacturing integration and (E) Processes and work instructions. The findings suggest that internal challenges need as much attention as external ones that originate from the customer. Also, an indication of when the challenges affect the supplier during product development is presented.

Monitoring properly the circularity performance of technical products is a point of increasing importance. Yet, evaluating the circularity potential of products during (re)design and development phases is a challenging task. In this study, several C-indicators are experienced by doctoral students and industrialists through two workshops on a real-world industrial product. The values obtained for each indicator are collected and analyzed: as all participant are working on the same technical product with the same dataset, the circularity scores calculated are compared to discuss the reliability and the uncertainty related to these indicators. These new empirical insights are put in parallel with the existing critical analyses of C-indicators from literature. As a result, future research directions on circularity indicators are advanced and discussed, including: the integration of uncertainty considerations into the assessment methodology of circularity indicators; the uptake by industry of such indicators during product design and development; the link between circularity and sustainability scores.

The early consideration of human factors in product development hugely favours the development of products, which excel with a positive user experience. The virtual environment of product development however, still has significant gaps in the virtual assessment and simulation of human factors, especially for user-product interactions composed of human movements. This motivates us to introduce a concept for data-driven prediction and analysis of user-product interactions. Heart of the concept is a predictive component that models the interaction between the user, represented by a musculoskeletal model, and the product, represented by product characteristics. We describe the implementation of this concept based on a pilot study for a lifting task. Motion capturing was performed to build a database and compare the results of our novel approach. The resulting kinematic and dynamic quantities show similar curve profiles with a small constant offset to the measured data. This indicates that the concept enables the virtual comparison of different designs or concepts regarding human factors.

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.

Societies are faced to ecological crises and widening disparities. This has to be integrated in the management of complex projects as they are increasingly complex and impactful. Value Analysis can serve assessing the value of a project i.e. knowing how the project will be perceived by the Stakeholders. It is a collaborative approach that helps make decisions in the early stages of a complex project.

This paper aims at demonstrating that a new “Sustainable Value Analysis” (SVA) provides a decision-making support toward sustainability. SVA uses a new definition of Value and a set of indicators based on the Doughnut.

Methods for the introduction of sustainability in the upstream design phases have limitations, which are highlighted in the literature review. Yet, the potentials of value approaches can be shown. Based on this analysis, an illustrative case is proposed to demonstrate how to integrate the ecological and social dimensions in a classical Value Engineering approach to determine SVA. The article concludes that the SVA allows identifying and characterizing the sustainable dimensions of Value, through a collective approach based on Stakeholders.

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.

Against a pandemic, speed is crucial, and open innovation (OI) helps to empower the human capital distributed around the world to tackle the disease and to launch rapid testing of possible solutions. This article aims at showing an OI program - called “TEN” Transform Emergency Now! - ideated and developed by the University of Bologna to identify, design, and implement useful solutions to tackle specific issues coming from pandemics. With an action research-innovation management approach, the University developed two iterations to identify what elements to take into account to define a program that works for this effort. In TEN, Frugal Innovation (FI) principles were injected in a 10 days hackathon to favor the use of locally available resources and raw materials and exclude non-essential features. Results show that Frugality can become an element of OI by (1) pushing the team towards basic functionality and minimal features of the solutions and low-cost implementation. (2) Designing, in parallel with the solution, an ‘implementation network’, with a specific process design and program's organizational perspective. We believe that TEN has the potential to be an OI approach designed for emergencies.

Industrial digital transformation is bringing a need for new tools and concepts. However, designing such complex tools and concept requires methods to be correctly implemented. These methods are studied as part of system engineering to satisfy various identified goals, and more specifically human-system integration, which is the topic of this paper. This article introduces the method used to define key elements of human perception of reality called reality anchors to design scenarios to be tested in a digital twin prototype. This method goes from regulation study to user cognitive function analysis on the specific case of digital twin designing in oil-and-gas industry. This method highlighted the differences between theoretical process and the followed process as well as tools and competencies used to identify reality anchors. This knowledge will then be used to implement a new process to be implemented with a digital twin and scenarios to test the prototype using realistic simulation.

Data, information and knowledge are strongly involved in Engineering Design (ED) process. Despite the crucial role played by data in the design process, there is a lack of studies about how different data are used and generated by the various phases of the ED process. This study is a first attempt to fill this gap by mapping which data types are involved in the different ED phases from a research perspective.

In order to achieve this objective, we used a methodology based on Text Mining. Firstly, we retrieve a corpus of scientific papers related to ED; then, we build two lexicons to recognize ED phases and data types; finally, we collect these entities within ED papers and map the relations between them.

The methodology application allows the building of a network graph for visualizing the relations among data lexicon and ED lexicon. Then, we investigate the specific relations among data types and ED phases by building a heatmap to investigate data types from 3 different perspective.

The insight coming from our analysis shows that ED studies have a great potential in the usage of many data sources, but also that there exist some gaps to be solved in order to reach a more effective data usage in the context of ED.

It is generally accepted in industry and academia that trade-offs between functional design objectives are an inevitable factor in the development of mechanical systems. These trade-offs can have a large influence on the achievable robustness and performance of the final design, with many products only functioning in narrow sweet-spots between different objectives. As a result, the design process of multi- functional products can be prolonged when designers concurrently attempt to find sweet-spots between a number of potentially interdependent trade-offs. This paper will show that designers only have six different approaches available when attempting to manage a trade-off while trying to ensure robustness and a sufficient performance. These fall within one of three categories; accept, optimise, or redesign. Selecting the wrong approach, can result in consequences downstream which can be difficult to predict, amongst others a lack of robustness to geometric variation, constrained performance, and long development lead time. This points to a substantial potential in the synthesis of design methods that support the identification and management of trade-offs in early product development.

A Product Service System of Systems (PSSoS) is a set of products, services, infrastructure, and a network where its constituent elements exhibit operational and managerial independence. As such, a PSSoS shows PSS characteristics of heterogeneity and evolvability and SoS characteristics of emergence and diversity. Neither existing PSS nor SoS development approaches fully address these characteristics. Thus, PSSoS development raises new challenges. In this paper, we propose a PSSoS meta-model that integrates PSS and SoS key concepts, to provide a basis for future PSSoS development methods.

Prototyping as a central method within innovation- and product development processes has a high acceptance in industry. Various prototyping tools provide impressive visualizations of product ideas in early development stages and especially low fidelity prototyping methods seem easily applicable. However, a closer look at prototyping in practice reveals a number of misunderstandings and barriers regarding effective prototyping, often related to different stakeholders’ (e.g., developer, designer, client) ideas about the purpose of prototyping. Based on a combination of literature analysis, adapting existing models and methods in user centered design (e.g., personas, double diamond design process) and empirical results from industrial research cooperation, we introduce a focus group format and a first model of prototyping maturity, which can help organizations to reflect on their state of practice in prototyping on an individual, team, and organizational level. The maturity model also forms a valuable theoretical lens for design research. Thus, our research aims at researchers in the field of prototyping as well as practitioners involved in prototyping and innovation processes.

Introducing irrigation to smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) can increase food security, improve nutrition, and reduce poverty. To explore the possibility of using drip irrigation on smallholder farms in SSA, we introduce a feasibility study that views the design space from both a user-centered lens, explaining how drip might be successful in the future, and from an engineering lens. With a first-order model, we compare estimated capital costs of drip and sprinkler systems for various farm profiles and show that drip has the potential to be a viable technology for many farms in SSA.

Team collaboration is a critical necessity of the modern-day engineering design profession. This is no surprise given that teams typically possess more task-relevant skills and knowledge than individuals (Levine & Choi, 2004). Advancements in digital media provide new opportunities for collaboration across the design lifecycle. However, early stages of the design process still pose challenges to digitally mediated design collaboration due to greater representational abstraction and the presence of multiple modalities for design ideation. Usually, design teams spend a substantial amount of time generating a broad set of ideas that can lead them to a wide range of design solutions during the ideation phase. However, sooner or later, teams should narrow down their vision for a final solution. What factors influence team members to eliminate or select an idea? Our study is an attempt to demonstrate some examples of this challenge. By drawing on research in team cognition, particularly the concept of transactive memory system (TMS) we studied a design teams' communication and media use during the ideation phase. The goal was to see if media type and communication modes can predict a team's decisions on selecting and eliminating ideas.

Oversizing of building service systems has a direct impact on building efficiency and operational costs. The research of this paper highlights several major contributors to the issue of oversizing. A key factor is the excessive and uncoordinated application of design margins applied during the multiple stages of a building services project; others include, a lack of communication and transparency across the various stakeholder groups, and the use of vague or unreliable data upon which initial project requirements are based. The impact of these factors on system performance and cost, and how these can impede on a building's ability to meet energy efficiency targets are analysed and discussed.

The paper emphasises the need to develop robust processes that capture the scope and rationale for the margins applied, and to communicate this knowledge in a clear and unambiguous format, to all project stakeholders. The development of flexible and alternative design solutions that apply diversity principles, such as different backup systems to provide resilience rather than the traditional ‘like-for- like’ redundancy solutions, are also explored.

The healthcare sector is facing significant challenges that require a systems approach, resulting in a rapid growth in the application of systems approaches in healthcare since the beginning of the 21st century. Consequently, healthcare practitioners and policymakers now desire to understand the evidence-base for the approach, but little evidence of the kind desired exists. This paper is a first step in conducting a narrative review of the application of systems approaches in healthcare based on a systematic review of the academic and grey literature. First, the emergence of the approach in healthcare is explored. Second, specific examples of applications of systems approaches in healthcare are examined to identify any missing elements in current practice. Third, fourteen reviews of the approach in healthcare published in the last ten years are analysed. The results suggest that the use of the approach in healthcare will most likely continue to increase, however, significant work remains for the design and systems community to demonstrate the effectiveness of systems approaches, specifically in providing convincing measures of impact on patient and service outcomes.

Product development in today's manufacturing companies is characterized by multiple development projects under intense time constraints. This means that the success of projects impacts the company's success significantly. However, industrial practices show that many projects fail to meet their time targets. This paper presents a methodology to systematically improve project schedule adherence of development projects by combining exploratory data analysis of historic project data with project scheduling optimizations to enhance the project schedules and enable more successful projects.