This paper examines the critical concept of "reasonably foreseeable failures and misuse" in product design. The psychology of failures and the ethical/legal implications are highlighted. The approach aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges associated with integrating reasonably foreseeable user failure and misuse into the design process. By taking a proactive approach to failure and misuse, designers can not only increase product safety, but also stimulate innovation that takes into account a wide range of user behaviour, including in unexpected circumstances.

The landscape of reuse and repair (R&R) activities for manufactured products is vibrant: new European laws, research projects, local initiatives. Our aim is to capture the current and future challenges of the field through an industrial workshop held at the ICED23 conference. A collective reflection was conducted with three French stakeholders: a Product Responsibility Organization, a social and solidarity organization, and a private company producing water-driven dosing pumps. The study results in a multi-level perspective on the R&R value chain and four R&R future scenarios.

We have a unique opportunity to consider justice in our design of a cleaner energy system. This paper introduces the Justice-Embedded Requirements Engineering (JERE) process, which was created to enable engineers to consider project goals, requirements, and potential project impacts on historically marginalized, climate-vulnerable communities. Given JERE's focus on energy technologies, we demonstrate the process using a concentrating solar power example. JERE provides engineers with a tool to better ensure justice is embedded in the system design process from the beginning.

Collaborative robots (cobots) allow for flexible manufacturing, supporting more customised product designs. Although safety is key for socio-technical human-cobot workplaces, existing safety assessment support like standards and guidelines require extensive experience and can be experienced as overwhelming. To make cobot risk assessments more accessible, especially for novices, and increase traceability from hazard to risk to mitigation, this paper presents a matrix-based approach that decomposes this daunting activity into smaller better manageable steps.

Designers must be equipped with methods to contribute to sustainability transitions. Scenario planning arose as approach to integrate future uncertainties while the low-tech concept promotes technological discernment. This paper looks at how low-tech fuelled scenario planning. Analysing institutional and archetypical scenarios shows a partial integration through high and low-tech extremes. However, more nuanced considerations are lacking. This paper shows that low-tech can bring an interesting dimension to future scenarios and thus contributes to method development for sustainable design.

Ad-hoc systems are socio-technical systems emerging in response to dynamic problematic situations. These systems form when situation systems interact with respondent systems organized by human agents using elements available in the situation and assets brought in from outside the situation. The immediacy of formation, fast evolution, and short lifecycles of ad-hoc systems intertwine design, implementation, and operation activities in complex ways not addressed by current approaches to Systems Engineering focusing on more sedate environments. The proposed framework presents a language for classifying fundamental building blocks of ad-hoc systems – single-agent intervention, staging, readiness, and development systems. Further classification according to the physical location of agents and assets relative to situations generates 16 system classes on the 4x4 matrix of Ad-hoc Systems Gameboard, which is a helpful tool for managing the evolution of system portfolios. Combining the Gameboard with mapping the systems onto the PSI matrix reveals additional relationships and evolution patterns, opening up promising directions to address the challenge of designing, planning, and implementing interventions in complex situations.

The amount of information in our society and its opportunities have given rise to Big Data research. The systems supplier industry needs suitable tools and methods to ensure the harvest and utilization of Big Data in their product development. This paper used Systems Thinking to analyze the current state in the industry and suggested leverage points for further research direction. The findings suggest that the research project should emphasize the industry cases, the collaboration between the companies and academia, develop a Big Data systems architecture, and maintain a socio-technical view.

A reason for the slow adoption of digital twins in industry is a lack of trust in the concept and between the stakeholders involved. This paper presents a Trust Framework for Digital Twins based on a literature review and an interview study, including seven recommendations: (1) explain your twin, (2) create a common incentive, (3) make only one step at a time, (4) ensure IP protection and IT security, (5) prove your quality, (6) ensure a uniform environment, and (7) document thoroughly. Together with 20 concrete measures it supports practitioners in improving trust in their Digital Twin.

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.

Characterising a socio-technical system by its underlying structure is often achieved by cluster analyses and bears potentials for engineering design management. Yet, highly connected systems lack clarity when systematically searching for structures. At two stages in a clustering procedure (pre-processing and post-processing) modelled and external information were used to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty of clustering results. A holistic decision making on 1) which information, 2) when, and 3) how to use is discussed and considered inevitable to reliably cluster highly connected systems.

Design education increasingly blends technology learning with sociotechnical challenges, but little is understood about how students simultaneously engage with both of these elements. In this preliminary study, we describe the results of two offerings of a design course focusing on disaster response at a major public research institution. We present a preliminary analysis of 52 students’ course reflections suggesting that sociotechnical challenges uniquely contextualize technology during project-based learning, presenting promising opportunities for future design education and research study.

As a discipline, design science has traditionally focused on designing products and associated technical processes to improve usability and performance. Although significant progress has been made in these areas, little research has yet examined the role of human behaviour in the design of socio-technical systems (e.g., organizations). Here, we argue that applying organizational psychology as a design science can address this omission and enhance the capability of both disciplines. Specifically, we propose a method to predict malfunctions in socio-technical systems (PreMiSTS), thereby enabling them to be designed out or mitigated. We introduce this method, describe its nine stages, and illustrate its application with reference to two high-profile case studies of such malfunctions: (1) the severe breakdowns in patient care at the UK’s Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust hospital in the period 2005–2009, and (2) the fatal Grayrigg rail accident in Cumbria, UK, in 2007. Having first identified the socio-technical and behavioural antecedents of these malfunctions, we then consider how the PreMiSTS method could be used to predict and prevent future malfunctions of this nature. Finally, we evaluate the method, consider its advantages and disadvantages, and suggest where it can be most usefully applied.

This paper considers human-centered and socially appropriate robots as well as automation systems within the context of their cost-effectiveness. Usually, the objection of system designers is that approaches for human-centered and socio-technical design result in systems that are more expensive than those made by traditional methods, and are therefore not truly affordable, in particular for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). This widespread opinion is challenged in the paper by some arguments supporting the forecast that human-centered and socio-technical design will soon become justifiable in tangible (economic) as well as intangible benefits for all involved partners, including society at large.