Much of the work in design research focusses on the development of methods and tools to support engineering designers. Many of these tools are nowadays implemented in software. Due to the strongly growing use of computers and smart devices in the last two decades, the expectations of users increased dramatically. In particular users expect good usability, for example little effort for learning to apply the software. Therefore, the usability evaluation of design software tools is crucial. A software tool with bad usability will not be used in industrial practice. Recommendations for usability evaluation of software often stem from the field of Human Computer Interaction. The aim of this paper is to tailor these general approaches to the specific needs of engineering design. In addition, we propose a method to analyse the results of the evaluation and to derive suggestions for improving the design software tool. We apply the usability evaluation method on a use case - the KoMBi software tool for bio-inspired design. The case study provides additional insights with regards to problem, causes and improvement categories.

Product-service systems (PSS) are one of the business models that can promote circular economy and sustainability; however, to design this kind of solution, holistic approaches must be used, integrating different areas of knowledge. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual solution based on the PSS business model to the problem of reverse logistics of coffee capsules, through the application of the Requirements Engineering method for Sustainable PSS design, with a focus on the initial phase. With an emphasis on the business model and value proposition, a conceptual solution was developed to promote the circularity of the capsule chain based on the analysis of the main stakeholders' needs. The value proposition of the PSS solution for the issue of coffee capsules was described as the “cocreation of sustainable value to stakeholders to foster the circularity of the chain”, considering consumer involvement through education and rewards in product disposal processes. The results reinforce the need to integrate critical stakeholders to add the desired value in creating a sustainable PSS solution and the need to pivot the business model during the solution development process.

A case study during pandemic revealed the major drawbacks of the traditional product development process for MedTech industry. Disruption of conventional manufacturing, urgent need for accelerated design and production, faster regulatory approval have challenged the industry. In this paper the conventional medical product development process is explored based on the intramuscular injector case study. The study revealed core areas for improvement of the medical devices development process. The paper proposes the Lean-Agile methodology with the incorporated elements of Concurrent Engineering.

Manufacturing process selection presents numerous challenges to designers, including product complexity, consideration of production volumes and part tolerances. This paper introduces a design support tool based on the axiomatic design model to systematically transform requirements into functions and technological capabilities. The results from an evaluation of the implemented prototype tool in the field of medical device design demonstrates its usefulness in selecting the most suitable candidate manufacturing process for a given artifact, while taking into account multiple user requirements.

Visual stimuli can be useful in supporting design ideation process. However, researchers still know very little about how stimuli should be delivered to designers during the early design stage. This question is crucial to the effective use of stimuli because previous researches have proved that ill-presented stimuli can have a negative impact on design creativity. Therefore, an empirical study was conducted with the aim of exploring if and how combinational pictorial stimuli can affect designers' creative performance. Results from a total of 36 participants show that the design outcomes presented by the group exposed to combinational pictorial stimuli were more creative than those given by the group exposed to no stimuli or randomly presented pictorial stimuli. These results imply that the form of stimuli delivery can affect creative design outcomes and combinational pictorial stimuli best support design creativity among these three conditions. These findings give us a better understanding of the roles that visual stimuli play in design, which is expected to bring us important implications for both design education and design support tool development

Design scholarship has long roots in tackling wicked problems and sustainability, yet less is known about how professional designers interact with sustainability issues in practice. Based on interviews with 104 designers in 101 organizations in Finland, this study compares designer perceptions on the role of design in advancing sustainability. We identify six common roles, each with various foci on different design maturity levels in organisations. The findings support managers and designers in understanding which capabilities might be needed in advancing the role of design and sustainability.

Product success depends on its capacity to meet users’ expectations. Human Centred Design approach helps to reach this success by focussing on users’ needs in the design process. These needs are as well functional as hedonic. Designing products requires then to design hedonic properties affecting users’ perception. For sport products, people wants to improve their performances while maintaining their health. Sport products are then considered not only “sporty” but also “healthy”. Thus, integrating both health and sport expectations into the design process are necessary.

Last decades, Affective Engineering was developed to integrate perception into the design process. Applying this approach for sport products may allow defining and mixing sport and health perceptual characteristics all along the design process. However, defining these characterisitics into requirements implies to translate them into semantic terms. If we observe semantic descriptors for sport products and for health products, they seem opposite. In this paper, we aim defining a semantic space representative and respectful of both domains, sport and health, while they oppose.

Machine learning (ML) is a well-established research topic in Industry 4.0 is boosting its adoption. ML is also used for manufacturing cost estimation during design. Such approaches are commonly used to estimate the cost of mass-produced parts. Many consolidated historical data are available for training the regression models. Unfortunately, very often, such a database of data is not available.

The paper defines an ML approach for parametric cost estimation of axisymmetric components. The data for training the ML model derives from automatic software for analytically estimating the manufacturing cost. With a proper set of simulations, the tool can generate a large amount of data for training. The paper presents the steps for developing a parametric cost model using ML. The approach is based on CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Mining method. The proposed method was used to develop one cost model (to estimate the total cost that considered raw material and manufacturing cost). The obtained Relative Error is 23.52% ± 1.37%, coherent with E2516 − 11, Standard Classification for Cost Estimate Classification System.

This paper explores the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in Small Enterprises (SEs), focusing on the unique challenges they face. It presents four case studies demonstrating how low-cost, low-effort solutions can enhance efficiency and productivity in small companies. The solutions, developed in a local makerspace, address specific manufacturing challenges that lack affordable or existing off-the-shelf solutions. The paper highlights the value of iterative prototyping in implementing Industry 4.0 solutions and discusses how this approach can help SEs overcome adaptation challenges.

Digital transformation has become a mega trend topic for many enterprises globally. For some companies, customer interactions have been digitalized. But many companies still rely on physical interactions of customers with their products in the core value creation processes. Thus the key challenges for digital transformation efforts would be associating product-centered value propositions with digitalized services. In other words, the transformation of product-centered values into experience values co-created by customers with services supporting customers. The research goal of this paper is to identify different strategies for digital transformation in product-service systems (PSS) design so that diverse paths for digital transformation can be considered in designing PSSs. Three types for digital transformation strategies have been identified from PSS design cases conducted in a manufacturing servitization support framework project where PSSs have been designed for 15 manufacturing companies including SMEs and large companies with varying levels of digital technology. A classification for digital transformation strategies could be postulated with three primary dimensions and two supplementary dimensions.

Futures Literacy is the capability to imagine and understand potential futures to prepare ourselves to act and innovate in the present. This pilot study aims to understand how artistic methodologies and speculative design can support the collaborative exploration of futures in the context of work and contribute to developing peoples’ capability of futures literacy. Our premise is that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things can augment people and support their needs at work. To illustrate this process, we have presented a collaborative method that integrates an artistic intervention with speculative design activities. We tested the method in a full-day workshop with seventeen (17) participants from a Swedish academy responsible for enabling learning and competence development at work in the healthcare sector. The results indicate that the artistic intervention, combined with the speculative design activities, can challenge current participants’ perspectives and offer them new ways of seeing futures with technologies. These new ways of seeing reveal underlying premises crucial in developing the capability of futures literacy.

For successful human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration in design, human designers must properly use AI input. Some factors affecting that use are designers’ self-confidence and competence and those variables' impact on reliance on AI. This work studies how designers’ self-confidence before and during teamwork and overall competence are associated with their performance as teammates, measured by AI reliance and overall team score. Results show that designers’ self-confidence and competence have very different impacts on their collaborative performance depending on the accuracy of AI.

Implementing a product design that incorporates circular economy aspects is a highly intricate task. Its complexity stems from various aspects, such as the interdependent solution space and the challenge to evaluate the impact of circular design in early development phases. To facilitate informed decision-making, a support system is necessary that integrates product-oriented circular measures, and derives their effect on the product's design and its circularity. We present an approach for such a support system, including its evaluation on the design of an automotive center console.

The democratisation of design permits greater stakeholder involvement in what has traditionally been a domain reserved for experts; the design process itself. This is enabled by technological advances in fields such as 3D printing, virtual reality and high-speed peer to peer communication technologies which have fuelled the development of new and innovative design methods. This paper compares and contrasts different approaches to the democratisation of design, and in particular, those that aim to involve wider stakeholders in the design process itself. Three different approaches(design by play, design by generation and crowdsourcing for design) are defined and contextualised within existing design frameworks and their respective suitabilities to democratise different design phases are considered. An exemplar use case of each approach is presented in order to assess how stakeholder engagement is affected by each democratising strategy. The discussion compares and contrasts the approaches with respect to their applicability and utility for different stages of the design process and how the power dynamics of the design process are altered when the different approaches are employed.

The sentence “form follows function” is the best expression of the relationship between form and function of a product in modern product design. This implies that the form is essential to implement the function while it should be optimized and minimized for the function. Unlike general products, transformable products are designed with the intention to change the function and form of the product according to the situation. This paper presents the types and characteristics of transformable products determined by Phase Model we introduced. We collected 147 transformable product cases and analyzed them according to the change of functions and forms in each product. As a result, we classified the transformable products into four types: partial transformable product, multi-form product, multi-function product and full transformable product. We found that each type has unique characteristics with potential to drive innovation in product design field.

The research presented in this paper explores features of temporal design neurocognition by comparing regions of activation in the brain during concept generation. A total of 27 engineering graduate students used brainstorming, morphological analysis, and TRIZ to generate concepts to design problems. Students' brain activation in their prefrontal cortex (PFC) was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Temporal activations were compared between techniques. When using brainstorming and morphological analysis, highly activated regions are consistently situated in the medial and right part of the PFC over time. For both techniques, the temporal neuro-physiological patterns are similar. Cognitive functions associated to the medial and right part of the PFC suggest an association with divergent thinking and adaptative decision making. In contrast, highly activated regions over time when using TRIZ appear in the medial or the left part of the prefrontal cortex, usually associated with goal directed planning.

In order to ensure the user's acceptance towards a product, the user has to be captured with all his facets and requirements. In this context, many user-centred design methods only focus on single aspects such as subjective expectation or ergonomic product design. Correlations and connections or a common consideration of several user parameters are often neglected, even if this can provide useful information for improving the design of products. Dual user integration tries to close this gap to a certain extent and considers the user's subjective expectation in combination with their physiological capacities. An integral part of this approach is a target-oriented evaluation of the user. Currently available methods of physiological and subjective evaluation of the user are only partially applicable for dual user integration. Especially physiological measurement techniques are time-consuming and expensive. For this reason, this contribution presents a new concept for capturing and describing the physiological capacity of the user via semantic differentials. Thereby, motor functions, cognition and perception are considered.

Basically, the safe dissipation of heat is among others an important protection objective of dual purpose casks. Gas-filled gaps within such casks can play a major role for the thermal behavior as they act as thermal barriers due to the lower heat conductivity of gaseous fluids in comparison to metallic materials. However, additional heat transmission mechanisms, such as natural convection and radiation can also occur in a gaseous medium. This leads to both an expanded modelling and a prolonged computing time in numerical simulations. Within the scope of a research project in cooperation with Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate ENSI a simulation tool for the fast thermal evaluation of dual purpose casks is developed which combines analytical methods and FEA. The innovation is that the thermal effects of gas-filled gaps are considered by using analytical equations. Main focus lies on the implementation of heat radiation as a non-linear transfer mechanism. Therefore, an iterative calculation process is used and the effects of the iteration number is investigated. Furthermore, the influence of radiation in comparison to pure conduction is examined depending on the gap width.

A component-orientated approach is commonplace in the automotive industry where the development focus lies on components. However, current challenges in the industry necessitates a mindset change in the development. Shifting the perspective from the components to functions can help with changing requirements, manage increasing complexity, support cross-disciplinary development, and foster innovation. To successfully implement this approach, it is essential to address not only the technical aspects of the solution, but also the human and organizational aspects affecting the process for its long-term success.

This paper investigates the function-oriented development methods of complex mechatronic products. A systematic literature review is conducted to analyse the current state of research. The existing function-oriented development approaches are summarized, the technological, human, and organizational perspectives are analysed, and the research gaps are highlighted. It is concluded that while function-orientation gains significance in industry and academia, and the importance of human and organizational factors are highlighted in the literature, they are not yet widely considered within the current function-oriented approaches.

This paper reports an embedded single case study from a globally operating manufacturer for digital healthcare products. Based on nine semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and a diary study among employees, we were able to gain insights on the daily business routines and interactions of the design team, the UX research team, and the product management department. The results revealed several unexpected insights that indicate a practical mismatch between user-centred design processes learned from the textbook and design practice in the healthcare sector that warrant further research.