Many activities in the new product development requires the decision making to find the final solution from multiple alternatives and make an evaluation. Even methods to support decision maker are available, the decision can go to the wrong direction because of heuristics. “Decoy effect” is a heuristic that appears in a comparison when 2 of 3 alternatives are similar but different in quality. The alternative that is similar but better in quality is possibly selected. The paper aims to understand the decoy effect by investigating it in the pairwise comparison that is a powerful technique for comparing alternatives. In an experiment, 3 ideas for the next generation of apple peeler are compared in pairs with different sequences. An impact of the decoy alternative on the comparison between other two alternatives, is investigated. Results show low impact of the decoy effect in the pairwise comparison, but this effect induces a high chance of selecting the decoy alternative when comparing the results from this study and the previous study by proposing 3 alternatives in the same sequence. Applying pairwise comparison to avoid decoy effect is thus an idea that will be further investigated.

The utilization of data in design is a crucial aspect of shaping the product and service development. Despite the lack of extensive research on this subject, this study aims to bridge the gap by introducing the ‘D³IKIT’, a data-driven design process and toolkit. Through workshops, this process and toolkit offer a practical method for creating innovative product and service concepts using data and machine learning. Developed and tested with the participation of 42 individuals, the ‘D³IKIT’ provides valuable insights for both practitioners and academics.

In global competition, companies are continuously searching for a competitive advantage. A growing number of companies have identified the design of their products as a major success factor. The promises for companies associated with outstanding design are extremely attractive, ranging from better customer experience to higher sales growth. But even though the advantages of design seem to be compelling, companies are still having difficulties in leveraging the benefits of design.

In this paper, we want to identify the underlying challenges that explain this gap. We are especially interested in the role and challenges of design in interdisciplinary product development. Therefore, we perform a literature review that clarifies terminology, analyses research approaches and identifies challenges. We determine seven key challenges for design in interdisciplinary product development. Furthermore, we observe a limited scope of research approaches in the reviewed literature. Based on these findings, we propose three further research directions to strengthen the role of design in interdisciplinary product development in the future.

The development of technical systems requires close cooperation of stakeholders from different disciplines. This collaboration takes place in workshops. Driven by digitalization and by the current pandemic such workshops take place primarily online. Suitable collaboration tools and methods are crucial to success. At the beginning of such workshops, use and damage scenarios are identified. In this paper, we presented a method and tool for identifying and modeling use and damage scenarios, which we evaluated in 14 online workshops with a total of 118 participants over a period of almost 3 years.

3D printing is a widely used technology for automating the fabrication of prototypes. The benefits are wide reaching, and include low required expertise, accurate geometric form and the processibility of many materials. However, production of certain forms – especially large forms – can be slow. From review of the sub-systems, the hotend is commonly found to be the limiting factor. To improve this, a modified nozzle design is considered that incorporates a flat copper plate within the flow stream. Analytical simulation was used to guide this design before experimental methods validated the modifications. The maximum volumetric rate for the standard hotend nozzle is 14 mm3/s. The best performing modified nozzle increased the maximum volumetric flow rate to 26 mm3/s – an 86% increase. A series of popular parts were further considered, demonstrating a maximum ∼48% fabrication time reduction, and a mean of ∼23%. This enables 3D printed prototypes to be made more efficiently – both with regards to the design cycle and energy use – and allows designers to use the technology more rapidly than previously possible. By extension, this improves the efficiency of the design process.

As the complexity of the systems increases, so does the complexity of designing a suitable engineering IT architecture. Challenges reach from the definition of required and consistent functionalities and interfaces to the evaluation, which combination of IT tools fulfils the required functionality, usability and interoperability in the best way. Thus, we provide a procedure, methodology and modelling support for the definition of functional and logical engineering IT architectures and their holistic evaluation. The approach is part of an overall procedure and demonstrated in an example.

Renewable energy is increasingly used and promoted. In the UK, for example, large scale renewable energy farms have been used to supply electricity with great effect. Given the large number of homes, there is considerable impact to be made by small scale residential renewable energy systems. Despite solar panels being the most common form of residential renewable energy technology, only 4% of buildings in the UK support solar technology of any kind. For direct electricity generation, silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) arrays are the most utilised, and when used in a residential setting, they are typically mounted on the sloped roofs. This is where the problem lies. The technology comes with a high cost, and there is further financial burden of installation and maintenance, making solar energy inaccessible for many UK homeowners. This paper presents a research and design innovation project to make PV technology more accessible in the UK. Edge Solar, the innovative, affordable, new PV system concept for UK homes may become a promising solution to significantly improve the accessibility to the PV technology and renewable energy at the household level in the UK and beyond with further development and commercialisation.

Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) brings the possibility to manufacture innovative near-net-shape part designs. But unfortunately, some designed surfaces suffer from rough surface finish due to characteristics of the LPBF process. This paper explores trends in managing surface roughness and through a space industry case study, a proposed process that uses Additive Manufacturing Design Artefacts (AMDAs) is used to investigate the relationship between design, surface roughness and fatigue. The process enables the identification of design uncertainties, however, iterations of AMDA's can be required.

Due to the complexity of financial products, consumers with low financial literacy are left behind. However, few practical studies investigated the impact of digital advisory systems to improve customer experience. Configuration systems, as the most popular expert systems, have never been applied as a financial tool. In this study, we explore the application of configuration systems to educate consumers in achieving their financial goals. The results highlight multiple benefits from using the configurator, including greater financial literacy and improved individual financial decision-making.

This study provides insights into the capabilities and performance of generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, in engineering design. ChatGPT participated in a 48-hour hackathon by instructing two participants who acted out its instructions, successfully designing and prototyping a NERF dart launcher that finished second among six teams. The paper highlights the potential and limitations of generative AI as a tool for ideation, decision-making, and optimization in engineering tasks, demonstrating the practical applicability of generating viable design solutions under real-world constraints.

The rapid development of 3D printing technology has an impact on all aspects of modern manufacturing, design and society. However, the home use of 3D printers is still limited by the difficulty in deploying the software and the technology which both need professional understanding and training. How to enable non-technical home users to use 3D printers without the need for training, becomes an urgent problem for both academics and the industry. This paper is concerned in an investigation into home use of 3D printers, their needs and preferences, their impacts on the interaction design of 3D printing. First, a questionnaire survey supported by 127 non-technical users is conducted to understand their preferences on several key steps of the 3D printing procedure. Then, we integrate the survey results into the interaction design process to improve the usability of the 3D printing software. Finally, the advantage of our implementation is tested via the user satisfaction and feedback towards the post-use period. Our design project shows a simple method to extend 3D printing interactive software to non-technical users, and pushes forward the landscape of the home use of 3D printers.

While volume-driven industries such as automotive are characterized by a high degree of data backflow across all production cycles, there is still a certain residue in the planning and construction of process plants. This is firstly due to the high proportion of customer-specific requirements and secondly to the significant amount of value added on site during construction. To handle recurring project-specific process plants as time- and cost-efficiently as possible, optimal information exchange among contractors of various disciplines and the plant developer is a prerequisite. For this purpose, a holistic digital representation of the plant is created, which consolidates all relevant information in one place serving as a foundation of multiple digital twins. An approach to identify and define relevant information depending on their subsequent use is developed. On this basis, a framework is proposed to enable a multipliable BOM-based automatic definition of information backflow to instantiate digital representations in parallel to the planning and construction process. Furthermore, project-specific contextual information will be captured and referenced in a structured form preventing their loss for subsequent similar projects.

The Pugh Method of Controlled Convergence is evaluated based on social choice theory, both from an axiomatic basis, and by examining all possible cases of attribute ranks for a range of numbers of alternatives and numbers of attributes. The evaluation shows that, for a typical Pugh application, concept selection varies with the arbitrary choice of datum or is simply incorrect in about one-third of the cases. While there are merits to the iteration steps and creation of new alternatives within the Pugh method, a simpler and more expressive concept ranking procedure can give far superior results.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are affected by changing development, production and selling paradigms in globalized industries, where innovation is a driver for sustainable competitiveness. However, innovating is highly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises, as human resources are very limited and know-how are often highly specialized. It is often unclear which fields and factors provide the capability to innovate and which measures or methods can be applied to promote innovation based on existing competencies.

For this reason, the aim of this paper is to present a framework to support the innovation capability of SMEs by identifying promising fields for innovation and providing suitable innovation methods. A particular focus in this paper is a methodology for the description and identification of fields to foster the innovation capability in SMEs as a part of the introduced framework.

The paper presents a Model-Driven approach for Product-Service System (PSS) Design promoting an increased digitalization of the PSS design process based on the combination of data-driven design (DDD) activities and value-driven design (VDD) methods. The approach is the results of an 8-year long research profile named (omitted for blind review) featuring the collaboration between (omitted for blind review) and nine industrial companies, in the field of PSS Design. It combines VDD models and the supporting data-driven activities in the frame of PSS design and aligns with the product value stream and the knowledge value stream in the product innovation process as described by Kennedy et al. (2008). The paper provides a high-level overview of the approach describing the different stages and activities, and provides references to external scientific contributions for more exhaustive descriptions of the research rationale and validity. The approach is meant to ultimately drive the development and implementation of a simulation environment for cross-functional and multi-disciplinary decision making in PSS, named Model-Driven Decision Arena, describe in the concluding part of the paper.

Facing a rising competitive pressure, manufactures create advantages when they are able to offer customer-specific products to the conditions of a mass production article. Traditional configurators support the creation of personalized products from the elements of a modular product system, but are based on a pre-defined set of rules. The model based approach changes the environment of configuration from static configuration rules to the dependencies defined within the product's system model. So, by regarding target quantities of the user, the configurator identifies the optimal variant.

Productivity studies in the AEC industry has gained significant attention in the past decade, however the impact from actual industry application has not kept up. This could be attributed to the focus on construction productivity instead of engineering productivity. This paper presents a systematic literature review on engineering design productivity in AEC industry focusing on design research method applications.

Water scarcity and resource depletion can be expected during the climate crisis. Therefore, thermally loaded processes in particular, must be made more efficient in the future. Heat exchangers will play a key role in this optimization process. More efficient designs allow a greater heat flow to be removed from processes while mass flows remain constant. In this context, the heat-transferring wall of heat exchangers is a focus of current research on the design of heat exchangers. The aim is to increase the heat-transferring surface of the wall as much as possible and to keep the design space as compact as possible. Therefore, this study investigates the suitability of the differential-growth method for generating complex heat-transferring walls for heat exchangers using CFD-analysis. Firstly, a framework for generating the wall structures and a computational model for predicting the design influence of such structures for the thermal and fluid-dynamic behavior of the heat exchanger are presented. Thereby, the potential of such wall structures is analyzed in this study. Furthermore, the study identified weaknesses of such walls designed with the differential-growth method, which should be the focus of future investigations.

The paper focuses on comparative experiment on manufacturing and inspection of two different prismatic one-off parts, which have different complexity. Our experiment shows that transforming product definition method from the Drawing Centric Definition (DCD) to the Model Centric Definition (MCD) enables 28%-29% time savings in manufacturing and inspection phases of machined one-off part's life cycle. Furthermore, transition from MCD to Model-Based Definition (MBD) enables 5%-9% time savings, respectively. Applying of MBD enables more time savings in complex part compared to a less complex part.

This article investigates human geometry in design, allowing exploration of unknown geometries in Paralympic sports equipment. By creating a configuration map exploring the solution-space, optimal sit-ski seating positions–in the sense of performance and ergonomics–can efficiently be found for individual athletes. A physical prototype was developed, and an experiment was designed to identify changes in performance due to different geometries. The design method and application make it possible to translate critical angles onto geometries, and test individuals for optimal work ergonomics.