This study explores design strategies that designers adapt in different design environments and assesses cognitive load associated with acquiring, comprehending, and implementing strategies in concept product design phase. The findings from qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the traditional design environment exhibits a greater intrinsic load, thereby fostering a greater diversity of ideas, design strategies, and solutions. The digitally-mediated design environment demonstrates extraneous load, resulting in a tendency towards similarity in ideas, design strategies, and solutions.

The recent Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented transition to distributed design team collaboration in education and industry, and with the sudden change in working environments, researchers must consider novel risks introduced to the design process. This research established that student perception of risk differs through personal experience and the impact of risks are greater when working online. Recommendations are made on how these risks could be mitigated further to allow the successful implantation of distributed design through computed-supported environment in education.

Prototyping uses many models over its process, with varying strength and weakness offered by those in the physical vs digital domains. Working across domains is necessary but introduces a transition cost, process complexities, and risks lost learning. Drawing from Digital Twinning, this work explores the creation of integrated physical-digital prototyping workflows, where technology enables simultaneous cross-domain working. It contrasts four case-study implementations of integrated prototyping workflow to current practice, exploring feasibility, value, and implementation challenges.

This work investigates how the concept of affordance should be revised following the digital evolution. Starting from a review of the literature about affordance, the most acknowledged constructs are compared with the variegated definitions of digital artefacts. The paper proposes a definition of digital affordance, overcoming the inconsistencies identified in the literature. The study is enriched by a series of interviews to investigate the final users' perception of affordance. Finally, the paper shows the application of the proposed model with a case study related to food delivery services.

Digital Engineering is an emerging trend and aims to support engineering design by integrating computational technologies like design automation, data science, digital twins, and product lifecycle management. To enable alignment of industrial practice with state of the art, an industrial survey is conducted to capture the status and identify obstacles that hinder implementation in the industry. The results show companies struggle with missing know-how and available experts. Future work should elaborate on methods that facilitate the integration of Digital Engineering in design practice.

The world consequently gets faster, so does product development. Therefore, the stock of development and simulation data increases continuously. Unfortunately, inexperienced users cannot cope with the rising number of simulation requests in the time needed. Digital Engineering opens potentials to support the users with newly developed methods and tools. In this contribution, we present a method to assist designers, inexperienced in finite-element simulations to perform an initial check of changed parametric designs independently, quickly and with support in interpreting the results.

The implementation of Digital Twins has become a common task for many industrial companies to ensure a sufficient digitization of their products and maintain competitiveness. This results in the question of how to compensate additional effort caused by designing Digital Twins. With this paper, an approach for this compensation is presented by creating Digital Twin behaviour through utilizing SysML diagrams and directly derivate usable code from them for a further implementation. This offers a part solution of lowering the threshold for using MBSE and increasing its benefits.

The use of Additive Manufacturing (AM) can bring opportunities for industry, but several challenges need to be addressed, specifically the digital infrastructure comprising the AM value chain. A combination of a systematic literature review and an industrial use case study concludes that there is low consideration of the digital infrastructure in Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) methods and tools which has a negative impact on the industrialisation of AM. It is therefore recommended that further studies are to be made on how to manage the digital infrastructure in DfAM processes.

Digital artefacts call for new design challenges: they enable services, technology-driven and multidisciplinary never ended processes, uncouple form-function, in a social relationship that must be ecosystem-framed. Then, the usual design mindset is not proper and expected vs unexpected outcomes must be equally studied. A framework of methods, in view of the usual design variables and the new ones called by design of smart objects, is here offered. From that the seeds for the future aid to the design process of smart objects result. Then, Objectomy and one real application case are described.

Humans perceive through various sensory impressions, including the five senses. Not only the number of different stimuli in everyday life increase, but also the degree of assessment of urgent and irrelevant information. But online it is not possible for the customer to physically perceive and assess the haptics of a product. This paper focus on the questions if it is possible for humans to perceive and identify surface properties without using their sense of touch and if humans can judge and classify the haptics of a textile materials via digital channels through a purely visual perception?

In the digital era, products’ forms do not necessarily follow their function. Design fixation may happen when a designer attempts to generate diverse concepts. New design heuristics for digital design were extracted to support designers in the early conceptual design stage. Ten design heuristics were extracted from 998 RedDot award-winning concept designs (2013-2017) through a five-step process. It was preliminarily tested by four practitioners and proved to have positively influenced their conceptual design.

Primary among all the activities involved in conceptual design is freehand sketching. There have been significant efforts in recent years to enable digital design methods that leverage humans’ sketching skills. Conventional sketch-based digital interfaces are built on two-dimensional touch-based devices like sketchers and drawing pads. The transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional (3-D) digital sketch interfaces represents the latest trend in developing new interfaces that embody intuitiveness and human–human interaction characteristics. In this paper, we outline a novel screenless 3-D sketching system. The system uses a noncontact depth-sensing RGB-D camera for user input. Only depth information (no RGB information) is used in the framework. The system tracks the user's palm during the sketching process and converts the data into a 3-D sketch. As the generated data is noisy, making sense of what is sketched is facilitated through a beautification process that is suited to 3-D sketches. To evaluate the performance of the system and the beautification scheme, user studies were performed on multiple participants for both single-stroke and multistroke sketching scenarios.