Various aspects of the design process often lead to stress. This study used pre- and post-task surveys to gather information regarding the designer's cognitive experience, physiological response, and perceived sources of stress during concept generation, concept selection, and prototyping. Results confirmed that design is highly cognitive, and that mental stress is present. Variability in the results also suggests that a physiological stress component might be present. Additionally, perceived sources of stress were examined, and recommendations were offered for instructors of design courses.

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.

A central part of the design process is collaboration, harnessing specialist expertise often in meetings. We understand relatively little about how meetings serve teams of designers and their work and this study uses soft systems methodology to attempt to create structures that describe and explain meetings. The results suggest extension of the boundary of interest and suggest a conceptual framework which reveals some under-addressed stages and activities which may help designers improve their meetings.

Components of modern systems are characterised by differing lifetimes. The resulting lifetime heterogeneity (LTH) is a core criteria to determine life cycle options (LCO) for more sustainable products, e.g. by upgrading or reuse. Estimating the lifetimes is challenged by a lack of suitable degradation models (DM) describing the detrimental change performance of components during the use phase. This paper expands the state of the art in LCO selection by a method to evaluate fitness and sensitivity of DM based on the similarity of use cases, environments and operation profiles of the system.

The MedTech product development is experiencing a growing complexity of the design process. The design challenge is to keep the medical device simple and user-friendly while maintaining its interconnectivity with the other systems and products. The additional layer of complexity comes from the need to satisfy both - direct customers (pharma companies), and indirect ones (patients, health care practitioners, and pharmacists). Solving those design challenges must not compromise the safety of the end-user and must follow the regulatory requirements.

This research proposes the systematic design process for MedTech combination product development with the emphasis on product strategy and concept development operationalized by design thinking participative toolkit. The proposed approach serves the purpose of increasing the traceability between the early made business decisions on a product strategy level of MedTech company, and the engineering decisions made on product concept level. The ultimate goal of the research is to support the decision-makers with methods and tools which would allow them to make informed decisions on investment in a new MedTech combination product by Pharma and MedTech companies.

The objective of this paper is to explore challenges identified for implementation of scrum for hardware development intersect with agile principles found in the literature. A series of comparative analyses are done at the textual level, through logical intersections, and through thematic analysis. It is shown that there are five underlying themes found across two sets of scrum challenges (constraints of physicality and the 13 principles). These five themes include: flexiblity, chunkability, scalability, endurability, and teamability. These five themes further are found related to the defining principles of the agile manifesto. Using this understanding, future efforts will include empirical case study work to determine the impact that these have on application of scrum methods and tools. Additionally, guidelines should be developed to help hardware product engineers in applying scrum.

Established companies turn to new ventures for bolstering exploration activities, but we know relatively little of the product development processes of startups and new ventures and how different stakeholders are utilized in these. The current study investigated the product development activities and experiments of eight Finnish food and beverage ventures in a multiple case study based on 22 interviews. How the developed products fit into the existing portfolio and experience of the ventures seemed to define their enacted development process. Internal experimentation was a constant feature, although the type of experiments varied between different phases of the development process. External-facing experiments were less frequent and more for validation than concept generation. On the other hand, they also carried important market creation functionalities. The results suggest that more nuanced terminology around experimentation would be useful to determine what type of experiments serve different goals in the development process.

Nowadays, companies operate in increasingly competitive and dynamic markets with fast-changing customer needs. Simultaneously, major advances are being made in information and communication technologies, and the digitization of products is progressing. Based on these economic and technological trends, smart product-service systems (PSS) are emerging as a new form of business model. Recent studies show that the transition to developing smart PSS is a major challenge for companies and that they require methodological support, as their internal structures are undergoing significant changes.

In order to provide a sound basis for support, we have undertaken a comprehensive study to identify requirements for a smart PSS development framework. 24 interviews and 5 workshops with companies that have recently focused on the development of smart PSS provide a rich set of empirical data to explore the challenges faced by companies today. We systematically analyzed the data and evaluated the results with our respondents. To increase the robustness and generalizability of our findings, we performed a contextual literature review and analyzed additional cases. This led us to a set of 17 requirements for a smart PSS development framework.

The design of an active seat suspension for a mid-class passenger vehicle based on the given set of requirements is considered a combination of four subsystems; the carrier, the actuator, the spring, and the damper. The design of the former two is considered through the 10 and 16 concepts for each, respectively. Two overall designs are proposed for further development. One based on a dual Scott-Russell mechanism and one based on Sarrus mechanism. The first one is evaluated to have high stiffness, the second to be more cost-effective. The detailed design of the first concept is presented.

Individual traits strongly impact team composition and the biases arising from them can also impact design activities. One such bias highlighted in the study is the familiarity bias (i.e., a bias that might be present between the two individuals due to their prior acquaintance). In order to detect the familiarity bias, participants from 4 universities who evaluated their peers and rated them for (1) their perceived degree of influence, (2) trust, (3) the amount of agreement they had with the other team member and (4) the amount of agreement the other individual in the team had with them. It was found that familiarity bias exists in collaborative teams. Its impact on the four variables, especially on influence, was discovered. In the end, the study briefly highlighted the importance of studying the factors (like the one revealed in this study) that affect influence in design teams as it eventually impacts design outcome. It was found that the individuals who explore most idea clusters, are less likely to be perceived influential and teams having the most influence produced a smaller number of idea clusters. Overall, the study contributes to understanding the factors affecting human cognition and behaviour in the design teams.

Collaboration is common practice within design disciplines and beyond. Brainstorming, discussions, and prototyping tend to occur within the same physical space. The reduction of human interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these practices. In this paper, we focus on the possibilities and challenges of remote prototyping of four student teams by combining a double diamond approach with tools to overcome remote work challenges. The results were analyzed to understand crucial tools, advantages, and obstacles. The key challenges and opportunities were then identified and examined.

An early evaluation of a product along with the consideration of life phase specific actor(s) and environment(s) can help greatly to gain an understanding of the product's behaviour and interactions. Virtual Reality (VR) can help designers to examine later life situations of a product by means of use case scenarios. However, preparing a VR-scene is still a time-consuming and cumbersome task. A model based approach that uses behaviour models of SysML to describe a VR-scene can reduce the preparation efforts. Such an approach is helpful if it allows the reuse of already described VR-scenes or their contents. This paper talks about the reusability of SysML behaviour models that constitute a VR-scene. This reusability can only be achieved by the generic definition of model interfaces. Therefore, a new modelling approach is presented to facilitate the reuse of SysML behaviour models to form different use cases of a product in VR. This approach also talks about the interface definitions and the management of variants of SysML models. The presented approach is elaborated by an example model that contains variants and uses instances to build different use cases.

Learning innovation and design process is a necessity of the coming decade and games are a potential tool to do so. This paper proposes an extended taxonomy for categorising innovation and design games. The intent is to understand the essential, the similar and the different categories not only for development, but also for evaluation of innovation and design games, and in turn, help educators identify appropriate games for their learning objectives and curricula.

This paper adapts the agile scrum sprint, typically used in software development, to a prototyping sprint for mechatronic product design. The Design by Prototyping framework describes how the prototyping sprint can be used to manage the prototyping process in design projects through an agile-stage-gate hybrid model. A comparison of 18 student projects using either prototyping sprints or a traditional iterative prototyping approach shows that prototyping sprints helped students make more deliberate, strategic decisions about their use of prototypes.

Feedback loops are a key characteristic of engineering design processes that increase complexity, time to market, and costs. However, some feedback loops, due to design iteration, have a positive impact on design outcomes (i.e., the quality of the final design), so are worth the time and costs incurred. Other loops, resulting from rework, also have a positive impact on the final design but their impact on current projects, in terms of their urgency and so interruption, is high. Thus, overall, and drawing on socio-technical systems literature, some feedback loops are virtuous circles with a positive impact whereas others are vicious circles with a negative impact. In this paper, we report early work exploring these interplays between rework and design iteration through the development of process simulation models.

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) require a high level of interaction between the driver and the system, depending on driving context at a particular moment. Context-aware ADAS evaluation based on vehicle data is the most prominent way to assess the complexity of ADAS interactions. In this study, we conducted interviews with the ADAS development team at Volvo Cars to understand the role of vehicle data in the ADAS development and evaluation. The interviews’ analysis reveals strategies for improvement of current practices for vehicle data-driven ADAS evaluation.

Creativity is required in engineering design. It is required in the aspects of problem-solving - conceptualizing a new solution to a problem, and problem-exploring - conceptualizing a new problem. Studies show that, in both aspects, creativity is a difficult task in practice. The aim of this study is to support the engineering design community by easing the difficulty in the problem-exploring practice. To achieve this, a computational problem-exploring (CPE) model is developed to mimic how design engineers identify a valid design problem. Consequently, a CPE tool - Pro-Explora V1 is developed based on the CPE model. The CPE model consists of a synergy of emergent computational technologies including data retrieval and machine learning. A Markovian model is employed in the CPE model to enable a data-driven random process for exploring design problems. In pilot test, Pro-Explora V1 generated some engineering design-related problems which are meaningful, unique, and could not be distinguished from naturally generated ones. It provides support to design engineers in problem-exploring at the early stage in engineering design. This study contributes to the global effort towards data-driven processes in the fourth industrial revolution.

Design methods are claimed to support designers but, although they are largely taught in academia, their industrial uptake is still lacking. Many reasons have been identified about this flaw and some potential suggestions have been proposed and discussed in literature to overcome the problem. However, a further evidence is that although many students learn such methods from years, they partially or totally abandon the learned methods in their professional careers. This could partially explain the gap between academic and industrial diffusion of design methods. Literature provides suggestions for improving the learning experience of students but different didactical contexts may need more tailored solutions. The work shown in this paper exploits the problem solving potentialities of the TRIZ toolset to provide hints for improving a course focused on teaching a systematic conceptual design method. A set of suggestions has been obtained together some guidelines for applying the considered TRIZ tools to other didactical contexts.

This paper describes an approach for designing an energy efficient motion and task scheduling for an autonomous vehicle which is moving in complicated environments in industrial sector or in large warehouses. The vehicle is requested to serve a number of workstations while moving safely and efficiently in the environment. In the proposed approach, the overall problem is formulated as a constraint optimization problem by using the Bump-Surface concept. Then, a Pareto-based multi- objective optimization strategy is adopted, and a modified genetic algorithm is developed to determine the Pareto optimum solution. The efficiency of the developed method is investigated and discussed through simulated experiments.

Circular ecosystem is a growing research field that is gaining attention due to representing a more robust alignment structure than a single firm. However, prior research lacks empirical evidence on how circular ecosystems are structured and how orchestrators coordinate a set of actors towards a coherent circular value proposition. By studying nine organizations related to the carton packaging recycling ecosystem, we reveal the complexity of recovering and co-creating value in a systemic network with actors competing and collaborating simultaneously. Based on that, we propose a framework for orchestrating circular ecosystems. Our results indicate that orchestrators should integrate strategic actors, invest in infrastructure, and innovate in product design. We also discuss ecosystem resilience during and after the covid 19 pandemic, showing how the orchestrator was fundamental to the sustainability of the ecosystem. Overall, this paper contributes to increasing the understanding of inter-organizational relationships towards the circularity of resources.