In powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing, the definition of part orientation is one of the most important steps as it affects the quality, the cost and the build time of products. Different works already attempted to propose methodologies for the assessment of optimal build orientation based on criteria such as the minimization of support volume. Elicitation works with industry experts have shown that they use much more varied rules to determine the orientation of parts. For instance, they do not treat the different surfaces of the part the same way (e.g., experts state that “priority surfaces of the part must be oriented close to vertical”). Today, the available tools do not allow integrating these kind of specifications. This paper discusses a knowledge-based methodology for the evaluation of part candidate orientations in PBF. Desirability function approach is used to translate companies’ expertise in the form action rules into mathematical functions that are tested on geometries to provide metrics for assisting the decision-making. A case study is presented to illustrate the use of this desirability function approach on complex part orientation problem.

The implementation of additive manufacturing enables the the re-thinking of a product towards function-oriented design. This study proposes a method, which uses a set of rules and indicators to implement functional integration, part consolidation, part separation and on-demand manufacturing onto a conventional prodcut architecture to restructure it into an AM-oriented product architecture. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated on an assembly from the field of high temperature applications.

The T-Shaped designer has previously been identified as a design engineer with the desirable set of skills for a successful career. Twelve design engineers ranging from novice to expert, were interviewed to gain an understanding of their skill set, how it has evolved and how it needs to evolve in order to be futureproofed. With the use of qualitative, quantitative data and the development of a novel engineering skills profiling method, this paper found that 75% of design engineers did not exhibit a T-shaped skill profile, but a skill shape that has been termed ‘M-shaped’ or ‘Comb-shaped’. The majority of participants exhibited a great depth of specialist skills in multiple disciplines, not limited to their immediate field of work. All participants exhibited a wide knowledge of skills that allowed them to work across different disciplines, which included electronics, management or manufacturing, and so the wide vertical bar of the T-Shape design predicted by previous literature has been supported.

In our modern, interconnected and globalized world, design is in motion, to adapt to new situations. But successful Design in Motion must be based on Processes in Motion. For a target-oriented adaptation of the processes to the new, challenging conditions, the as-is procedures must be captured and analysed. For this analysis, established capturing procedures from production or administration cannot be used due to some special features of design processes and workflows, which will be discussed in this contribution. To compensate for the weaknesses of existing methods, we propose an adapted method for holistic design process capturing. With the procedure, we want to enable an economic process analysis, which is crucial for small and medium-size companies in particular. To give an insight into the practical application of the method, we exemplarily analyse the process of a shaft construction and FEM-evaluation by two different employees. Based on this analysis and to verify the relevance of the presented approach, an evaluation with respect to the requirements is done.

As design and design thinking become increasingly important competencies for a modern workforce, the burden of assessing these fuzzy skills creates a scalability bottleneck. Toward addressing this need, this paper presents an exploratory study into a scalable computational approach for design thinking assessment. In this study, student responses to a variety of contextualized design questions – gathered both before and after participation in a design thinking training course – are analyzed. Specifically, a variety of text features are engineered, tested, and interpreted within a design thinking framework in order to identify specific markers of design thinking skill acquisition. Key findings of this work include identification of text features that may enable scalable measurement of (1) user-centric language and (2) design thinking concept acquisition. These results contribute toward the creation of computational tools to ease the burden of providing feedback about design thinking skills to a wide audience.

In product family design, the commonality of products and performance are competing objectives when designers build platforms. The commonality makes it efficient to manufacture products while it will cause performance loss of products. In this paper, we assume that performance functions evaluate the performance of a product. Targets of performance functions are set for each product depending on the product's property. The designs that satisfy the target of performance functions are denoted as ‘good’ design points. By using ‘good’ design points, a weighted set cover problem (WSC) is applied to formulate the combinatorial optimization problem, which maximizes the commonality by minimizing the number component attributes. A recursive greedy algorithm is proposed to handle the general cost function in the problem for product family design. The formulation and the algorithm are tested for a linear three-degree-of-freedom (3DOF) model. In numerical experiment, the proposed method determines optimal values of the components which are suspensions, stabilizer bars, and tires in the vehicle model.

One difficulty with sketching pedagogy is the tendency to assess growth according to outcomes, as opposed to processes. We assessed eye gaze patterns between advanced and intermediate design sketchers and anticipated correlations between eye-gaze practices and sketching proficiency. Participants sketched two different objects using analogue materials, a potted plant from memory, and a MacBook from observation.

The study utilised Tobii 3 adjustable eye-tracking glasses and Tobii Pro data processing software. Twenty-five design sketching students and six design sketching instructors participated in the study.

Metrics measured include the quantity of reference line gazes, eye movement during line creation (targeting vs tracking), eye fixation duration, work checks per minute and subject gazes per minute.

The results show a difference in gaze patterns between intermediate and advanced sketchers, both in terms of practice and consistency. Eye-tracking sketching behaviours has revealed a new understanding of how teaching gaze habits could lead to improved methods of design sketching instruction.

When designing high performance sports equipment for Paralympic athletes, there are many unknowns for the design engineer to consider. The design challenge is an optimisation task per individual athlete. However, modelling this optimisation is difficult due to the many variables. This article presents the design of an experiment for identifying and evaluating various seating positions in Paralympic rowing by using a rowing ergometer with a modified seat. Results indicate that changing seating position has a substantial impact on per-athlete rowing performance.

Digital technology is dramatically changing our life, industry, and society. Recent evolution of digital technology is expected to significantly impact service work, such as healthcare and social welfare. Meanwhile, an insufficient understanding of service work and workers' needs leads to the failure of technology development and integration. To make digital technology better fit to values and work practices of service workers, various studies have been conducted, especially in the field of participatory design, interaction design, and service design. However, the contribution of engineering design to this topic is still limited. This paper proposes an engineering design approach to design digital technology for better integration in service work. This study combines a modelling method to represent specifications of digital technology and the participatory approach in alignment with the changing service work and workers' values. A case study of the mobile application system for elderly-care professionals is introduced to exemplify the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study intends to foster innovation of service work through digitalization.

In last years, an increasing attention on environmental matters is registered. Companies face environmental matters to increase the environmental performances of their products, forced by numerous legislations, normative and protocols and induced to the growing attention of consumers toward environmentally friendly products. However, observing the industrial context, it emerges there are several barriers for implementation of eco-design strategies inside design departments. The paper presents a tool which aims at both providing a basic guide on environmental sustainability issues and favouring the knowledge sharing among the different actors of the product design process. The core of the tool is a repository in which company materials, organized and collected in different forms, are collected. The repository contains several parts: training, guidelines, knowledge and milestone, accordingly to the type, structure and form of materials stored. The eco-design tool functions, structure, and workflow are presented and then preliminary test cases are described.

Managing general domain knowledge and asset-specific information in the form of digital representations is especially important and challenging when focusing on long-living and complex assets. Implicit knowledge and existing structures need to be captured and digitalised, ideally without introducing unnecessary complexity through unfamiliar wording or new structures. To achieve this, a methodical approach that utilises ontologies as well as system modelling techniques and focuses on early-stage model instantiation is presented and applied to the cabin retrofit of aircraft

The My Naturewatch project uses self-build wildlife cameras supporting new public engagements with nature & technology. The project used Open Design methods providing self-defined, bespoke making outputs, modelling ‘environmental citizenship’, transitioning beyond sustainability. By co-designing makers were encouraged to engage with ecosystems refocusing human habitats & perspectives driven by curiosity. The article shares a qualitative evaluation of the project's impact on participants, describing attitudes, understanding and behaviour towards technology & nature changed by participation.

In current era of Anthropocene, human activities and their consequences on Earth ecosystems are under the lens of scientific research. Researchers in every field of study are trying to find alternatives to promote sustainable development. So it is for design, where researchers exploiting the problem-framing and problem-solving nature of the design discipline itself, trying to find new methodologies and tools to enhance sustainable development.

One of the most important tasks in the design for a sustainable production is focused on material selection. In this paper, authors will present a reflection upon material selection methods and an overview of existing material repositories. Traditionally, material selection is usually attributed to designers or technical professionals but nowadays information concurring in materials selection became a complex task to manage. Therefore, authors propose a case study concerning information management upon materials and their selection presented in a new possible approach: material selection as a collaborative task between several departments of an industrial company, to promote an aware information management activity upon materials.

Nowadays, our society needs that an awareness be made about our impact on the planet. Many more or less alarmist reports tell us that there is a need to change our consumption patterns, production and energy consumption … One of the main axes to achieve these goals is education. Thus integrating sustainable development into the skills of future engineers is an essential challenge but above all a necessity to modify and reduce our impact on the environment and to allow a global understanding of the complexity of our society. For this, companies must also evolve. Some will do so in a strategy of greening their image, others will have to comply with the various regulations of their sector of activity and a final category of these companies will use this opportunity as a vector of innovation. Each at their level will make a contribution, the integration over time of new sustainability skills within their staff will expand their action. In this article, we will focus our study on the integration of ecodesign in the industry and the impact that this generates in terms of skills to acquire, values to evolve and knowledge to master.

The transmission of information between requirements modelling and function modelling in the product development process often appears challenging because of multiple used models and different terminology of specific disciplines. The integrated function modelling (IFM) framework is used for functional analysis of technical moderate complex systems and supports cross-disciplinary modelling and communication in the design team. To improve the applicability of this method and its supporting purpose in the modelling process, the authors combined requirements as an additional entity with the existing entities of this method. Furthermore, the extended framework has been used to visualise the procedure with this approach as an example. The outlook provides the potential for further development of the method.

The capacity of building services in many hospitals exceeds the requirements by significant amounts. Oversizing of building services has a direct impact on building efficiency and operational costs, ultimately impacting upon patient care, by diverting much needed funding. A key factor leading to the oversizing is the excessive and uncoordinated application of design margins across various project stages. Based on a hospital case study, this paper analyses the reasons for the overdesign of a replacement cooling system and raises the importance of managing margins activity to avoid overdesign.

The development of cloud-based Computer-aided design (CAD) enabled real-time CAD collaboration between multiple designers. While this technology has great potential to change the way CAD work is done, it is still little explored. This paper presents a case with two high-performing and two low-performing three-member teams monitored with non-invasive methods (log data) during a six-week design project. The results show that high-performing teams focused more on the editing of assembly, while low-performing teams focused on creating and editing a part. Furthermore, high-performing teams tended to perform consecutive deleting actions and to transition to creating and editing classes of CAD actions after performing viewing actions. Two modelling approaches which lead to high-quality CAD models were identified. One approach is characterized by frequent use of transitions between editing and Organizing-Design (collaborative actions) classes, while the other between creating, editing and reversing classes. Presented results allow design teams to gain insight into sequential patterns which led to the generation of a high-quality CAD model and to better understand the CAD modelling process.

This article presents a design of an experiment for investigating the effect of changing the geometry of Paralympic alpine sit-ski poles/outriggers in the LW 10-12 class. An experiment design for mapping an individual athlete’s performance parameters has been developed, with a resolution for finding the optimal outrigger geometry. By prototyping an adjustable experiment setup with implemented sensor systems, the performance increase can be analysed and implemented in new equipment. Results show that changing double poling geometry provides a substantial performance increase, regarding time and propulsive force.

The ideation process has a significant impact on the initial concept generation and final product creativity of the design. Visual stimuli play an important role in the process of innovative product design. With the increase in computing capability, generative design methods are widely implemented. In this paper, features of design targets and combinational objects in 2 combinational design tasks are fused using adversarial neural generative networks to form the generated stimuli. It is also used with combinational object pictures to investigate the impact on creativity in design ideation. The study invited designers to use and subjectively self-evaluate the two stimuli in a design task. Through analysis of participant data (n=20), the results showed that the generative stimuli had an advantage over the combinational image stimuli in terms of the smoothness of creativity in the design ideation of outcomes. And there is a positive correlation between designers' years of design education and their tendency to prefer generative stimuli. Based on the results obtained, ideas are provided for the study of the influence of visual and generative stimuli on the designer's ideation process.

The design of systems today often involves computer simulation to assess performance and design margins. Understanding how variability erases design margin is important to assure adequacy of margins, especially in optimization efforts. In this paper, we develop a toolchain using open source code libraries in Python, and encapsulate it in Jupyter notebooks, to provide an open source, interactive uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis toolchain. This works generally with simulation tools, where a reference folder is created containing a script that reads an input file of parameter values and runs the simulation. With that easily created, the toolchain executes the necessary uncertainty quantification steps with replicates of that reference folder. This approach fits within a broader workflow outlined that defines the variation modes to study, maps to simulation inputs, and screens the variables for sensitivity before conducting an uncertainty quantification. An example is shown in the simulation analysis of a Stirling engine.