This piece of work is concerned with how shapes are generated, explored and transformed during the architectural designing process. It postulates that the relations and connections between sketches, produced during the design activity, can be defined in terms of shape transformations and described according to a closed list of shape operators. These latters provide a formal description of the shape exploration process and allow a deep understanding of its logic. To achieve its goal, this study creates a model to describe the different shape transformations, performed by designers, during the sketching activity.

The progress of science and technology has considerably increased the quality of life - especially the material standard of living - (e.g. disappearance of famines, increase in life expectancy) On the other hand, climate change, reduction of biodiversity, decrease of natural resources, and increase of environmental risks are some of the consequences of this human activities. Addressing these new challenges will require holistic comprehension and actionable approaches. The mitigation of these consequences requires effective responses in terms of transition. In this context, engineering and design students need time but also adapted curricula focused on sustainability and eco design concepts to support evolution of their skills, their knowledge and their culture. This article discusses the integration of a strong sustainability knowledge within the ideation process through a pedagogical experience, in order to develop new knowledge-based approaches, methodologies and tools

Engineering projects involve the progressive development of preliminary information until a final design is reached. Appreciating its status may help make better decisions about task sequencing and may reduce unnecessary iteration. We present an approach to 1) elicit this maturity, 2) aggregate several of its facets per subsystem and generate insights for task prioritisation, and 3) overlaying this information in Augmented Reality onto a physical prototype. The progress is discussed and it is proposed that the approach can aid understanding, communication and management of design progress.

In an increasingly interconnected world, changes of uncertain nature and impact affect the functioning of human societies that depend on health, ecological, and economic systems. The proposed framework for systems-of-systems resilience explains ways of accommodating and responding to these challenges while encompassing the interfaces of the health, environment, and economy domains and their effect on communities. Resilience is defined as a continuous process and we distinguish between four system properties, five resilience capacities, and a variety of system activities.

The study presented in this paper investigated the impact of embodied and self-reflected virtual reality (VR) experiences on engineering design students' cognition and perception of nature-relatedness during the early conceptual design phase. Results showed that students who explored the design environment as a bird (embodied) or human (self) avatar were significantly more likely to explore a larger design space indicated by more semantically unique design concepts compared to students without the VR experience. Network graphs of the syntactic connection of design concepts revealed notable differences among the three groups. The bird avatar group showed more connections to nature-related and social concepts, while more technical concepts were central for the human avatar group, and concepts about money were more central to the control group. Finally, students who embodied the bird avatar had a significantly stronger perception of connection to nature compared to the human avatar and control group, with a small to medium effect size. The results suggest that embodied (as a bird) and self-reflected (as a human) VR experiences can enhance engineering students' design thinking and perception of connection to nature.

This paper presents a novel approach to include a holistic description of abstract physics in a digital engineering framework. Physical phenomena realize the numerous functions of technical systems and are an important link between rather abstract product functions and the concrete product geometry and material. Until now, a possibility to integrate the analysis and synthesis on this level of abstraction into a holistic engineering frameworks is not existing. The novel approach employs graph-based design languages using UML for this endeavour; the product example is a two-wheel scooter.

Free contributors have successfully shown the potential in large/complex software co-creation in the Free and Open Source Software Movement, triggering many discussions and exploration ventures from academia to industry and to the government. Though many research efforts explored whether the same level of co-creation efforts could take place broadly in the hardware realm, very few research studies focus on profit-seeking hardware projects initiated by companies. In fact, the specific nature of being tangible and profitable makes company-led open source hardware projects suspicious to be really “open” to contributors. Community has been identified as the critical driver in many open projects. By reviewing the evolution of company-community interactions over time and different community behaviors in different open development context, authors in this paper hope to identify best community- company interaction forms for open source hardware companies. Using grounded theory and case studies, we construct a framework to describe and identify company community's different behaviors and different roles.

This paper proposes a method to automatically generate a multi-domain matrix (MDM) from textual activity specifications. The format for specifying these activities is based on a structured grammar derived from natural language and consists of two types of activities: goal activities and transformation activities. A goal activity describes the purpose of an action performed by an actor for the benefit of another actor in the system. A transformation activity describes an activity from the viewpoint of a single actor, who receives, generates, and outputs information or artifacts. If one describes activities using these two types of activity specifications, dependencies can be automatically derived between actors, activities, and parameters of the system and visualized in an MDM. Thus the generated MDM presents an organization DSM (actors), a process DSM (activities), and a parameter DSM (flows of information or objects), as well as the mapping matrices coupling the different domains. An illustrative house construction example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed activity specification format. The method may provide an outcome in understanding and managing complex systems.

Education for Sustainable Development requires raising individuals' awareness of problems relevant to the environment. We designed a Generative Toolkit that supports industrial design students carrying out a Speculative Design task and through this process initiates greater problem awareness of low metal recycling rates. In this paper we give insights into the Toolkit's theoretical derivation and the design process. Findings from testing suggest that there are several opportunities for improvement, such as considering further content-related competencies in the Toolkit's design.

Though many engineering schools are integrating sustainability in the curriculum, most are still struggling, especially with social sustainability. The aim with this study was to test a process created to help students work systematically with these issues. Results show that students in the study did indeed benefit from structured process support as their general knowledge level of social sustainability issues as well as their understanding of how to integrate them in a product assessment was very low. Reflections from teaching staff on how to further develop such a process are also shared.

Today, information and knowledge as competitive factors influence the success of companies as much as traditional production factors like human resources or physical capital. However, the reuse of design knowledge still represents a major challenge for engineering organizations. That is, because barriers exist hindering a successful knowledge reuse. On the basis of a literature review, the research depicted in this paper analyses the relation between single information conveying design knowledge and barriers hindering a successful knowledge reuse. Developing a model-based approach, we propose a micro logic containing three steps and underlying methods enabling practitioners to identify situation-specific barriers within their organization. We illustrate the industrial application of the approach in a case study at a mining machinery OEM.

Interest in applying a “lean” philosophy to design has been slowly growing in recent years, but there are still few broadly applicable methodologies and illustrative cases published in the literature to guide lean design processes. Lean approaches promise cost reduction and increased product value, which could be particularly beneficial in product development for low- and middle-income country markets, where value demands are high. We use the clinical need of efficient diabetic foot risk assessment in lowresource healthcare settings to present an example of lean early-stage design of a medical device. The background of existing medical literature and commercial products is intentionally leveraged throughout the design process to streamline development and minimize the need for independent validation of product strategies and design features. Our approach resulted in an efficient design process that generated a novel, purely mechanical plantar pressure evaluation device that can indicate high risk of diabetic foot ulcer in resource-constrained settings. This case provides a practical example of how design processes can be adapted to be leaner where there are large gains from minimizing design cycle time and cost.

Academics teach engineering design based on design theory and best practices, practitioners teach design based on their experience. Is there a difference between them? There appears to be little prior work in comparing the design processes of design academics and practitioners. This paper presents a case study in which the design activity of a team of academics was compared to that of a team of practitioners. The participants’ verbalizations during team discussions were coded using the Function- Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology. A qualitative comparison reveals that the team of practitioners constructs the design space earlier and generally spends more time in the solution space than the team of academics. Further, the team of practitioners has a significant number of direct transitions from function (F) to structure (S), while no such transitions are observed for the team of academics. Given that this is a single case study, the results cannot be used as the basis for any generalizations on how academics and practitioners compare. This is a successful proof of methodologies that lay the foundation for a series of hypotheses to be tested in a future study.

The design of ITER, a large-scale nuclear fusion reactor, is intertwined with profound research and development efforts. Tough problems call for novel solutions, but the low maturity of those solutions can lead to unexpected problems. If designers keep solving such emergent problems in iterative design cycles, the complexity of the resulting design is bound to increase. Instead, we want to show designers the sources of emergent design problems, so they may be dealt with more effectively. We propose to model the interplay between multiple problems and solutions in a problem network. Each problem and solution is then connected to a dynamically changing engineering model, a graph of physical components. By analysing the problem network and the engineering model, we can (1) derive which problem has emerged from which solution and (2) compute the contribution of each design effort to the complexity of the evolving engineering model. The method is demonstrated for a sequence of problems and solutions that characterized the early design stage of an optical subsystem of ITER.

Engineering Design decisions impact customers, the environment and society at large in ways that have profound ethical and strategic implications for designers. Previous research in decision-based design has proposed the decisions should be made on the basis of maximizing the expected utility of the design to the designer. This paper discusses ethical and strategic challenges for these frameworks across five levels: the axioms that underlie utility, the definition of utility, the consideration of multiple stakeholders, the modeling scope, and resulting design framework implementation. Based on these problems, solutions are suggested to account for each in the development of improved, ethically- informed frameworks. Challenges presented here do not prohibit the prudent use of decision-based design frameworks per se, but instead point to cases that must addressed in practice while providing grounds for further research towards the development of decision-based design frameworks that are ethical by design.

Design, delivery and improvement processes in healthcare is of great challenge due to increasing pressures on healthcare systems alongside inherent complexities, resulting in limited benefits or unforeseen consequences. A recent Systems Approach framework has aimed at responding to the calls about implementing a more holistic approach. Though being an approach in its own right that can iteratively and systematically structure, guide, and/or facilitate design and improvement projects in healthcare, it can also augment existing approaches that have already place in healthcare designers' and improvement practitioners' agendas. Thus, the objective of this paper is to compare and contrast the questions, activities, and tools of the Systems Approach with processes of other major improvement approaches in healthcare to demonstrate their coverages, overlaps, and extended and new opportunities to pursue in the light of the Systems Approach.

The field of autonomous vehicles is gaining wide recognition in the industry, academia as well as social media. However, there is a lack of knowledge on expectations of people regarding this topic. To this end, this paper analyses extant research on perceptions of people in various countries about semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles. Secondly, based on the findings of this analysis, we developed a questionnaire to gauge the perceptions of the people in Sweden regarding such vehicles. The findings have important implications for the design of AVs in Sweden, and possibly other countries.

In this paper, a proposal for a new method to design load-adaptive microlattice structures for PBF-LB/M manufacturing is presented. For this purpose, a method was developed to stiffen microlattice structures in particular by using self-similar sub-cells to ensure their manufacturability. The quality of the stiffness increase was investigated and verified by finite element simulations. Subsequently, the simulation results were critically discussed with respect to their potential for future design processes for architected materials.

One of the most challenging activity in the engineering design process is the definition of a framework (model and parameters) for the characterization of specific processes such as installation and assembly. Aircraft system architectures are complex structures used to understand relation among elements (modules) inside an aircraft and its evaluation is one of the first activity since the conceptual design. The assessment of aircraft architectures, from the assembly perspective, requires parameter identification as well as the definition of the overall analysis framework (i.e., mathematical models, equations).

The paper aims at the analysis of a mathematical framework (structure, equations and parameters) developed to assess the fit for assembly performances of aircraft system architectures by the mean of sensitivity analysis (One-Factor-At-Time method). The sensitivity analysis was performed on a complex engineering framework, i.e. the Conceptual Design for Assembly (CDfA) methodology, which is characterized by level, domains and attributes (parameters). A commercial aircraft cabin system was used as a case study to understand the use of different mathematical operators as well as the way to cluster attributes.

Healthcare systems are under strain, this creates a challenge for designers to develop solutions for better health and care delivery. This paper presents a sandbox of illustrative design themes used to improve health systems based on state of the art research projects. These were collated from presentations at The Second International Meeting on Healthcare Systems Design Research, held at DTU-Technical University of Denmark. Attending groups were mapped based on their research keywords, target journals and methodologies in order to gain insight on the communities research landscape.