Patent analysis is a popular topic of research. However, designers do not engage with patents in the early design stage, as patents are time-consuming to read and understand due to their intricate structure and the legal terminologies used. Manually produced graphical representations of patent working principles for improving designers’ awareness of prior art have been demonstrated in previous research. In this paper, an automated approach is presented, utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify the invention working principle from the patent independent claims and produce a visualisation. The outcomes of this automated approach are compared with previous manually produced examples. The results indicate over 40% match between the automatic and manual approach, which is a good basis for further development. The comparison suggests that the automated approach works well for features and relationships that are expressed explicitly and consistently but begin to lose accuracy when applied to complex sentences. The comparison also suggests that the accuracy of the proposed automated approach can be improved by using a trained part-of-speech (POS) tagger, improved parsing grammar and an ontology.

Junior designers are not trained to cope with critical situations and conflict at work. Most design schools do not educate their design students to prepare them for (potential) conflict. As a result, junior designers often do not have conflict-handling skills to handle critical situations and conflicts. While some tools and methods exist to help them make responsible design choices, these often address value differences underlying (potential) conflict without taking the perspective of the designer, and thus without supporting young designers to start by reflecting on their own intrinsic values.

The aim of this study is to find a way to help junior designers to reflect effectively on critical situations, thereby improving their conflict-handling skills. Data was collected through four steps in an action research. Researchers collaborated with an identity programme for junior design professionals. Insights from try-outs and small interventions were transferred into design requirements for an approach to educate and facilitate junior design professionals to reflect more effectively on critical situations.

There is little tolerance for deviation in time, budget and quality in the execution of product development projects. On the other hand, the project environment is gaining complexity. Changes on project scope are daily business. We set up an initial hypothesis, that unplanned changes -newness- has negative impact on projects. We developed and executed therefore a survey about factors belonging to innovation, complexity and newness to test their perceived impact on project success. Our data show a positive correlation between unsuccessful projects and newness, which is discussed in the paper.

This work studies the perception of the impacts of AI and human process managers during a complex design task. Although performance and perceptions by teams that are AI- versus human-managed are similar, we show that how team members discern the identity of their process manager (human/AI), impacts their perceptions. They discern the interventions as significantly more helpful and manager sensitive to the needs of the team, if they believe to be managed by a human. Further results provide deeper insights into automating real-time process management and the efficacy of AI to fill that role.

PLM systems are key enabling systems in the development of today's products. Introduction of a new PLM capability is an expensive and risky undertaking. Many implementation projects end in tears in the sense that they are frequently late or even cancelled. In this paper, a federated PLM architecture pattern – Genesis – is introduced and evaluated against prevalent PLM approaches. From an architecture perspective, Genesis with its two distinct integration tiers decrease the number of integration points and thus cost and complexity.

No matter a system's size, complexity, or domain, iterations are fundamental to its design process. However, there is a duality: iterations are both signs of usefully exploring the system's design space and failure to find an appropriate solution. This ambiguity means that we have not been able to connect teams’ iterating behavior to their design's performance, potentially obscuring a way to influence the design process.

As such, our exploratory study unpacks the relationship between design iterations and performance. We observed 88 teams in the 2020 Robots to the Rescue Competition in rich detail. Using logs of 7,956 iterations on a Computer-Aided Design platform, we analyzed how high- and low-performing teams revised their submissions, searching for consistent differences in their behavior. We found significant differences in the iterations’ number, scale, and cadence between these groups of teams. These findings emphasized the correlation between certain iteration patterns and the success of a design: the best teams will likely revise differently than the worst ones. It also showed the importance of a fine-grained, time- dependent view of the design process to resolve open questions in the literature.

High stiffness fracture fixation devices inducing absolute stability, activate inefficient primary healing and stress shielding. Taking High Tibial Osteotomy as a representative example, review of the clinical literature and mapping the fracture healing process revealed two physically contradicting requirements, which are only partially met by current techniques. Stiffness of the fixation is required immediately after fracture, however in the remodelling phase this can cause stress shielding. Stability is required immediately after fracture, however in the ossification phase less stability is required to stimulate secondary (and more efficient) healing. This study evaluates the use of the TRIZ Inventive Design Principles to overcome these physical contradictions. Six designs concepts were evaluated, of which the Macro-Geometry stiffness modulated design was ranked the highest. This was achieved through spatial decomposition of the problem utilising the Inventive Principles of Asymmetry, Extraction and Local Quality. This study offer perspectives on how to increase the patient specificity of fixation utilising the increased topology freedom of design for additive manufacture (AM).

Using bio-inspiration allows engineers to use the knowledge implicitly built up by natural evolution. Current tools for providing engineers with bio-inspiration yield many biological working principles. Starting from the Linnaean taxonomy, which can be seen as a design revision history, this work proposes metrics for a working principle based on the observations of that working principle in different organisms. A first metric measures the reinforcement of a working principle via the number of observations (publications/submissions to a database) made by biologists. Furthermore, biological strategies that evolve independently and use the same working principle might be more resilient and globally applicable, prompting the proposal of a metric measuring the spread in the taxonomy. Finally, bio-novelty measures the biological novelty, inversely related to the biological diversity employing the working principle. To illustrate the use of the metrics, they are applied to the working principles identified in the ‘temporary attachment’ category of AskNature.

One challenge with design automation is system transparency with adjustable granularity because of the many different forms of representation from multiple disciplines. Previous research has focused on visualization through the generation of graphs, packaging into electronic books, and model highlighting. The research presented in this paper focuses instead on a visual programming approach, commonly applied in the building industry, where design assets and external references are wrapped into visual components and managed on a canvas with information input/output relations displayed. This entails additional documentation efforts, but the visualization is arguably more useful as groups and levels of granularity are adjusted by the engineers themselves as a part of the development work. To explore visual programming and its potential benefits as a way of enabling transparency with adjustable granularity of DA systems within mechanical manufacturing industry, an existing textual design automation system was transformed into a visual one using Grasshopper® (a visual programming environment) and discussed with respect to DA system transparency, feature-based CAD, and DA system development.

Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems were created to address the driver's failures. All these ADAS are a part of the evolution of the vehicles towards whole automation. To complete its launch in the automotive market, autonomous vehicles have to pass safety tests to acquire the consumers’ trust. To receive the approval of the public, the self-driving car has to take into account the human feeling. The risk perceived by the driver is one of the new emotional form to integrate at the validation plan. The purpose of this study is to examine the perception of the risk of a self-driving car's driver.

Prototypes are a critical aid in the product development process, allowing designers translate concepts to reality. However, the execution of prototypes depends heavily on the designer experience, evidenced in research in the need of creating design support tools to establish a standard for a prototyping effort. To improve on these findings, the Proto-Arch is introduced as a partial result of creating a standard for executing prototypes in each product development phase based on the prototyping roles and purposes. Proto-Arch defines the prototyping activities in the embodiment design phase.

The application of agile development methods in response to increasing market dynamics and product complexity is a key lever in the automotive industry. Agile methods originally come from the software industry and enable fast, flexible and customer-oriented product development. These methods are also increasingly being used in hardware development. However, the evaluation of the benefits of agile methods in the context of automotive development has been primarily subjective. The publication aims to present a first data-based approach to objectify the benefits of agile methods in automotive development by highlighting the effects in the quality of collaboration within teams. A standardised procedure is therefore designed and presented. On the one hand, a model for measuring the agile maturity of teams is described. On the other hand, the quality of collaboration within a team is examined in different aspects using standardised key performance indicators. Based on the proposed procedure, a strong positive correlation was found between the considered key performance indicators of the quality of collaboration and the agile maturity of the development teams within the investigated organisation.

One of the aims of systems engineering is to develop systems with a number of pre-defined configurations, in order to operate effectively and efficiently in different contexts and environments. Early in the design phase, system reconfiguration allows to propose and optimize these configurations. With regard to the literature review and industrial observation, pre-defining the standard configurations without relying on hints from end users has been raised as a major difficulty within the industry. In this paper, we propose a reconfiguration framework which considers data collected from the use phase in order to generate valid and optimized configurations with regard to stakeholders needs.

What do common devices such as smartphones, CD’s and solar panels all have in common? They are all examples of innovative technology that is still limited to flat, rigid geometries. This is primarily due to the limitations of the manufacturing processes used to create components within these devices, key among them the thin polymer films produced through spin coating.

Spin coating is a technique used due to its ability to effectively create uniform films on the scale of micro or nanometres. However, it relies on a planar substrate to produce uniform layers, thus restricting the design of components manufactured using this process to simple, flat objects. As the requirement for curved device geometries expands, complex alternative fabrication methods are being implemented in industry.

For spin coating to remain relevant, a viable process for controlling the fluid flow over curved surfaces must be developed. This research investigates the hypothesis that coating distributions can be controlled through optimized rotation of a curved substrate. Where a multi-axis rotational manipulator and novel characterization system have been developed to investigate the fabrication of curved devices using the improved spin coating technique.

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.

This paper explores the interplay of feedback principles in design and systems science. From their roots in engineering, biology, and economics, it investigates intersections between design, cybernetics and servomechanisms. The synthesis emphasizes the need for considering feedback in anticipating unintended consequences and proposes an integrative view reconciling fundamental assumptions from the different fields through simulation. This holistic approach underscores the pivotal role of feedback in understanding and addressing complex phenomena, such as rebound effects, in design science.

Current CE approach, and its many definitions, does not explicitly consider the interconnectedness of the biological and technological cycle. This paper uses state-of-the-art to articulate nuances of the CE to encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the concept from a perspective of both cycles. The results address that acknowledged sustainably driven shifts of resources between cycles are neglected in most state-of-the-art. Therefore, the Dual Circularity (DC) definition is proposed and further evaluated by three examples.

Environmental sustainability represents an unavoidable design driver. The consciousness of the importance of tackle the topic of environmental sustainability since the first stages of the product lifecycle is slowly spreading through enterprises. However, although they reach this grade of awareness, it is hard to introduce additional considerations to the traditional drivers of functionality, manufacturability, assembly, cost, etc. Therefore, it is crucial to identify methods and tools to support companies in efficiently integrating environmental sustainability issues in their design process. This paper proposes an approach to identify the inputs, functionality and outputs suitable to each industrial reality. Its core is the eco-design tool matrix, that estimates the tool implementation time and suggests proper outputs; from this the necessary inputs and functional blocks are derived. The approach is applied to the cases of two Italian industries, very different one another. This proves the wide applicability of the approach. The definition of a validation procedure represents the next steps to identify the benefits of the approach.

Considering the prevalence of digital interaction within the Generation Alpha, this study focuses on the digital wellbeing of elementary school-aged children in South Korea. By taking into account the multi-faceted nature, this study frames the issue that exists within children's digital wellbeing as a complex problem and aims to have a better comprehensive understanding of the system using a designerly and systems thinking approach. Thus, this study conducts a Systematic literature review and thematic analysis to get grasp of the current situation which then is translated using a systems thinking-based visualization tool to convey the causal relationships that exist within the system. Therefore, the outcome of this study presents a concept map that consolidates the findings to communicate a holistic perspective of children's digital wellbeing which can be used in design activities and decision-making processes which contribute to future design solutions and conversations.

With increasing level of advancement and complexity in medical devices, there is a need for methodology, tools and techniques in practice to integrate Human Factors and Usability (HF/U) elements in design due to its increasing diversity of users and rapidly changing interface types. This paper proposes a methodology to develop a tailor-made HF/U design guidelines for medical device development with various sources and to develop heuristics for evaluation and score the product usability throughout the development process.