Technology use provides great benefits by extending human ability, but the negative effects cannot always be ignored. The author examined the dilemmas of technology use based on Shibata's analysis of McLuhan's extension theory and indicated two types of dilemmas in continuous technology use. First is the decreased human ability as the innate functionality is substituted by the technology. Second is excessive utilisation of the technology, which may instil a false sense of naturally extended ability.

Subsequently, the author considered and suggested approaches for mitigating both types of dilemmas. The decreased-ability dilemma might be resolved by continuously utilising the technology and designing technology relevant to the degree of human ability. Meanwhile, the excessive-utilisation dilemma might be resolved by regulating the technology use and designing technology that achieves the desired disposition change in users.

Finally, the possibility of advancing the existing design approaches to further resolve the dilemmas was discussed.

Resilient systems have the capability to survive and recover from seriously affecting events. Resilience engineering already is established for socio-economic organisations and extended network-like structures e. g. supply systems like power grids. Transferring the known principles and concepts used in these disciplines enables engineering resilient load-carrying systems and subsystems, too. Unexpected load conditions or component damages are summarised as disruptions caused by nesciense that may cause damages to the system or even system breakdowns. Disruptions caused by nescience can be controlled by analysing the resilience characteristics and synthesising resilient load-carrying systems. This paper contributes to a development methodology for resilient load-carrying systems by presenting a resilience applications model to support engineers analysing system resilience characteristics and behaviour. Further a concept of a systematically structured solution catalogue is provided that can be used for the classification of measures to realise resilience functions depending on system adaptivity and disruption progress. The resilience characteristics are illustrated by 3 examples.

Generating novel design concepts is a cornerstone for producing innovative products. Although many methods have been proposed for supporting the task, their performance depends on human ability. The goal of this research is to build a method supporting designers to generate novel design concepts with the knowledge of what factors have positive effects on the novelty. Toward the goal, this research assumes that the more distant two function concepts chosen, the more novel idea would come up with by the combination of the two concepts. Based on the assumption, this paper introduces a notion of novelty potential of the combination of two function concepts, and proposes a method to assess it by the function similarity. It is calculated with the integration of a lexical database for natural language called WordNet and a distributional semantics method called word2vec. The proposed method is adapted to case studies in which students perform design concept generation for given design tasks. The correlation analysis is performed to verify the assessment performance of the proposed method. This paper discusses its possibility based on the results of the case studies.

Novel product concepts are often down-selected in favour of the incremental development of available designs. This can be attributed to the fact that for the development of a new product, simulations and analysis based on high-fidelity CAD models are required, which are expensive to create. To solve this problem, the use of a function model (FM) as intermediate step between ideation and embodiment is suggested.

The approach has been examined in a case study with an aerospace company for the development of a turbine rear assembly, using multiple workshops and interviews with practitioners from the company. A multitude of novel solutions, even extending the functionality of the legacy design, were captured. The FM approach proved to support the representation, analysis, and configuration of 102 different concepts. Although supported by the FM model, the embodiment still showed to be a bottle neck for further development. The subsequent interviews with practitioners showed that the benefits of the approach were seen, but experienced as too complex.

Further work will concern a more systematic connection between the FM and CAD model, in order to automate of the embodiment process.

The design of various products is driven by requirements that describe extremes. In marine structural design, joint extremes of environmental variables like wave height and wind speed are used to define load cases. Similarly, in ergonomic design minimum and maximum values of anthropometric variables are considered to make sure a product is suitable for a wide range of users. Here, we present a method that supports designers to define requirements using joint extreme values: the requirements contour method. The method is based on structural engineering's environmental contour method and uses a dataset and statistical methods to specify a region in the variable space that must be considered in the design process. That region's enclosure is the requirements contour and holds the joint extremes. After formally describing the method, we give an illustrative example of its usage: we use it to define requirements for the design of an ergonomic handle for a power tool. The requirements contour method is a field-independent approach to design for extremes. In the tradition of design for X, we think that a design project can benefit from applying methods that focus on different 'X's.

Design Thinking has become increasingly popular across different disciplines. However, what it exactly entails is becoming more and more vague, leading to the term being used for many different approaches and applications. This paper presents an interview study with experts on the application and training of Design Thinking in academia and industry. We find a divide with some seeing Design Thinking as a mere toolbox of methods, while others see it as an umbrella term for the mindset that determines how designers think and act. Subjects unanimously attest the approach large potential to support certain types of businesses, when applied under the leadership of trained designers, but see a lot of danger for the approach to become meaningless if it keeps being advertised as an all-purpose problem-solving tool. The interviewees further share extensive experiences on specific success factors and pitfalls in applying Design Thinking in practice.

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.

Design methods can provide valuable support in structuring and solving complex product design problems. However, the application and the transfer of methods from academia to industry is limited. To date, research has tended to focus on solving this through improved method selection, method adaptation and training. The development of design methods itself has attracted surprisingly low attention. This paper closes this gap and adds a quite new perspective of systematic requirement management of method development. However, the variety of methods, method users and application contexts is a key challenge and does not allow for a universal set of requirements. Thus, this paper transfers the concept of solution-neutral requirements frameworks, which are established in product design, to method development. The framework is derived from analysing and structuring different requirements found in literature. Different requirement sub-/categories allow for accommodating the varying levels of detail of requirements. The framework works like a checklist and helps design researchers to consider the most important requirement categories, which subsequently can be detailed project-specifically.

Various tools for participatory design approach have been developed to support users to engage design process. Doll scenario is proposed as a generative tool for letting participants make and enact scenarios. However, suitable context to practice doll scenario is unclear in comparison with other tools using scenario. Therefore, our overall objective is to increase understanding of characteristics of making scenario in two different ways of expression; with doll and storyboard. We developed a doll scenario method, doll staging. The tool was evaluated in comparison to storyboard at a workshop which is a part of a new product development project in a corporate. The workshop was evaluated by semi-structured interviews with the participants and observations of the workshop and design outcome. The result suggests that doll staging allows participants to think from users’ perspective in developing new idea. These findings provides new direction to choose scenario based design tools according to objective or context of design project. We also discuss potentials and research directions to use tools for developing scenario in corporate contexts.

In embodiment design, functions are implemented in a technical systems embodiment. For doing so, design engineers need to understand the relations of embodiment and function. Many systems change their states during function fulfilment which complicates their relations and leads to ambiguity in design decisions. The challenge for design engineers is that they often need to make important decisions about the design before they can use sophisticated analytical models to investigate them. This contribution presents a structure for the C&C²-Sequence Model as a non-analytical model to support design engineers in modelling embodiment function relations. This structure contains four dimensions that are derived from the state of the art and preliminary work. It enables the structuring of gained knowledge about embodiment function relations and supports their communication in design engineering teams. Two development projects in academic and corporate environment are conducted using the structure to investigate its applicability. In these projects, design engineers were able to document and use gained knowledge about the investigated complicated systems.

A first exploration is conducted to what the French biological philosophy of technology perspective has to offer to the field of design methodology. If this French perspective is combined with contemporary speculative pragmatism a generative design methodology emerges offering novelty in what is sensed as important in a design situation. Within this perspective, drawing upon the late French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, technical objects have their own mode of existence and their own trajectory of development apart from human intention.

Designers working with such a generative design methodology follow the constitutive value of openness and attune to the regulative value of techno-aesthetic judgments. By way of a 'vignette+', a paradigmatic example from a real case, a more encompassing argument is made towards design situations where a sophisticated machine is 'inserted' into a domestic setting.

The example taken is the use of an artificial kidney machine in a domestic setting and the development of a novel machine with a design team. Four aspects were sensed as important in the unfolding design situation and directions for further research are discussed.

Testing contributes to success of engineering design as it plays an important role in gaining insights about the system in development. Literature indicates that for success in engineering design, gaining insights about relations of embodiment and function is crucial. In this contribution, an investigation of how insights about embodiment function relations are gained in testing, is conducted. For this, the testing documentation in a student development project is analysed. The results show a correlation of gaining insights about embodiment function relations to success in engineering design. Potential for improvement in data acquisition and processing is uncovered, which will be used in a succeeding study to investigate this issue in more detail.

Although the conceptual design is a fundamental process through which design decisions are made, its focus is on finding the right solution. Is finding the right solution enough for a good design? Defining the problem or applying a solution-focused process may not be enough to create the differences that must be present in today's variable conditions. This can be overcome through seeking meaning instead of seeking a solution. The purpose of this article is to develop an approach that focuses on seeking meaning for products by starting with a design-thinking approach to the conceptual design process in engineering design. Focusing on a search for meaning in engineering design will provide advantages, such as creating unique values and sustainable competition.

Graph-based design languages offer a promising approach to address several major issues in engineering, e. g. the laborious manual transfer between CAD and CAE. Such languages generate a digital meta- or system model storing all relevant information about a design and feed this into any relevant CAE tool as needed to simulate and test the impact of any design variation on the resulting product performance. As this can be automated in digital compilers to perform systematic design variation for an almost infinite amount of parameters, such graph-based languages are a powerful means to generate viable design alternatives and thus permit fast evaluations.

To leverage the full potential of graph-based design languages, possibilities are presented to expand their applicability into the domain of product functions. This possibilities allow to cohesively link integrative function modelling to product structures. This intends to close the gap between the early, abstract stages and the systematic, concrete design generation and validation with relevant CAE tools. In this paper, the IFM Framework was selected as integrated function model to be linked with the graph- based design languages.

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.

In “Grande cuisine” creation and tradition co-evolve in a rich number of ways. Great chefs still use recipes from the 19th century and may also reinvent gastronomy itself. The creation heritage of culinary Art is the paradoxical capacity to both “respect” tradition and “break” its rules. Building on C-K theory, we show that such creative heritage needs multiple and independent layers of knowledge that “speak” of basic fixed objects. These properties correspond to general mathematical structures that we find in Topos theory. Thus, C-K/Topos predicts creative design strategies that can respect tradition in different ways. It also proves a form of “innovation within tradition” - “sheafification” in Topos words- that is not a compromise and builds on tradition itself. These findings fit with the lessons of great books of gastronomy. C-K/Topos has a wide scope of validity: it applies to any innovative design that needs preserving systemic structures, like engineering systems or social and environmental systems. C- K/Topos models with a high generality how local and radical innovation can warrant systems incremental change. C-K/Topos will have implications for teaching and research.

Organizations seeking to improve their performance, like Corporate Social Responsibility targets, face a key organisational design challenge. Designing the key components of the organization and their layout will have major impact on performances, and needs thus a robust design process. Organisation theory provides several models and methods to answer that need. Yet this design process has not been confronted to design methods literature, such as systematic design. The aim of this paper is to provide a synthesis of multiple theoretical elements coming from organization sciences, confronted with a classical engineering design model, to reveal similarities, differences and lacks of current literature on organization design. Our analysis of the available literature on organisation theory, organisation design and change management showed that this design process is close to systematic design, but we also highlighted several breaks in the design process, such as the lack of functional approach.

While prototypes are critical to the creation of successful products and innovative solutions, building a prototype is characterized by large sunk costs and a plethora of unknowns. The versatility and effectiveness of prototypes paired with the ambiguous nature of developing a prototype can lead to wasted resources. Recent studies support this claim, demonstrating that under certain circumstances, designers often prototype without a clear purpose, building prototypes as a function of the design process rather than as a function of the design. These findings motivated the creation of the Prototyping Canvas, a tool to aid designers in planning for purposeful prototypes by identifying critical assumptions and questions to guide development. Business and engineering design literature influenced the development of the canvas, which was first tested with a client project in the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC). The feedback and insights from the design team guided revisions to the canvas. The updated canvas was then validated with 55 professionals during a design project sprint. The purpose of this paper is to present the Prototyping Canvas as a valid and effective design tool.

Prototypes are often used as a tool in the product development process and their usage is advised in many guidelines, frameworks and product development methods. Those prototypes achieve different goals of which most relate to getting new insights and information about the product in development. For the development of those prototypes however, significantly less development methods are available compared to the number of methods for the development of products. Investigating the process of using a prototype leads to the idea that the main purpose of those prototypes is describable as learning about the product. This idea is elaborated further and followed by the introduction of the detailed process model for prototyping which is primarily based on the detailed process model for products. However, the purpose of the prototype differs from the purpose of the product which leads to some significant changes of the model. To give an example of a prototyping process, the development of a sensor- integrating elastic claw coupling is introduced and analysed. In addition, this paper discusses the question, how other product development models may be applied to the development of prototypes.

In the production of automotive body components, fixtures are an important part of the ongoing work on geometrical assurance. The fixture is uniquely defined for each component, and the design and configuration of these are time-consuming and takes a lot of effort. The objective with this paper is to explore the use of a design automation approach and application to semi-automate the configuration process of the fixture product. The paper presents an approach to automate the configuration of the fixtures in a flexible way, by reverse engineering the configuration of the fixture product from a generic blueprint that represents the expected outcome of the process, using a knowledge-based engineering approach applied to a computer aided design (CAD) environment. A reverse-engineered design automation toolbox for a CAD-software is developed. The toolbox is developed to lead a user through the configuration process, in the way that the experts want it done, end-to-end, making use of some unconventional solutions from a design automation perspective.