Boundaries between products and services vanish and companies increasingly offer hybrid solutions known as Product Service Systems (PSS). Thereby, a holistic view that includes both the product and service parts must be taken. This paper presents a discrete-event simulation of a PSS as a method for the specification of the product part. Besides product and service, the application scenario and the decision-making are also modeled. Based on the results for a case study, the customer requirements could be guaranteed as the essential product specifications were optimized to minimize total costs.

Transferring natural language requirements to use case diagrams helps to avoid inherent ambiguities. However, this is usually a manual, time-consuming task that can be accelerated by utilizing Artificial Intelligence in terms of Natural Language Processing. Thus, this contribution proposes a conceptual framework for automatically grouping interrelated functional requirements and deriving use case diagrams by combining formerly isolated approaches. Moreover, the latter are evaluated by a qualitative potential analysis to support their future industrial application.

The remote management of equipment is part of the functionalities granted by the design principles of Industry 4.0. However, some critical operations are managed by operators, machine setup and initialization serve as a significant illustration. Since the initialization is a repetitive task, industrial robots with a smart vision system can undertake these duties, enhancing the autonomy and flexibility of the manufacturing process. The smart vision system is considered essential for the implementation of several characteristics of Industry 4.0. This paper introduces a novel solution for controlling manufacturing machines using an embedded camera on the robot. This implementation requires the development of an interactive interface, designed in accordance with the supervision system known as Manufacturing Execution System. The framework is implemented inside a manufacturing cell, demonstrating a quick response time and an improvement between the cameras.

The maker movement has garnered interest from many disparate fields, from engineering to business management, to behavioural science, to city planning. The reason for this interest no doubt stems from the promised potential of the maker movement to revolutionize not only product creation and manufacturing, but in extension the economy around it. This paper examines existing literature across disciplines for evidence of what the maker movement has achieved so far, with a focus on implications for the field of Industrial Design.

The megatrend sustainability will significantly change the future value creation of manufacturing companies. Their current linear value creation models need to change to conform to the requirements of sustainability. To face the challenges the circular economy has emerged as a promising economic model. With the shift from a linear to a circular economy, companies have to adjust their current business models. However, they still lack knowledge and adequate methods to develop circular business models. Hence, the aim of the paper is a circular business model canvas (CBMC) for designing circular businesses. A systematic literature review was conducted to identify significant criteria for circular business models. The criteria were analyzed utilizing a qualitative content analysis to derive the business model elements required for the circular economy. Existing elements from the Business Model Canvas were enriched and five new elements, e.g., reverse logistics, were found. Then, the business model elements were logically arranged resulting in the CBMC. It guides companies to systematically develop business models for the circular economy. The CBMC was evaluated by applying it within a mediumsized company in the electronics sector.

Chronobiology is the science that studies the role of time in biology. The study of time in human bodies revealed the presence of internal rhythms related to the time of day. Considering divergent thinking as one of the essential cognitive activities of conceptual design, this paper presents the results of investigating the effect of time of day on designers’ brain activity while performing divergent thinking tasks. An experiment was run with a revised Alternative Uses Task, measuring brain activity with an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. Students with different educational backgrounds were recruited for this experiment, including engineering and industrial design students, to determine if the time of day affected them differently. The brain waves and related power results show significant differences with respect to the time of day and educational background. The differences are particularly evident considering the interaction of these factors. Further studies are required to understand the relationship between the differences detected and the designers’ behavioural performance and to identify which time of day is most effective for idea-generation activities for designers.

Students mental health is declining. StudyWell is a project aiming at positive impact on student mental health in student cities in Norway; by integrating relational welfare with service design, and the study environment as a starting point. We discussfour implementation challenges: First, co-design depends on a shared mindset across disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, balancing the lenses of individuals, community, system and future require facilitation. Thirdly, societal impact requires continuous partner anchoring. Finally, approaches must not further pathologize university student.

The purpose of the study is to understand the design considerations for creating a provocative financial planning toolkit with services to help facilitate more constructive and meaningful conversations to build trust and empathy between financial advisors and senior people. We conducted four rounds of 60-minute co-creation workshops with eight invited participants from various design disciplines to work in pairs to generate four preliminary concepts suggesting design considerations. We used ATLAS.ti to do qualitative research analysis under an NCT (notice, collecting, thinking) model to identify 22 codes synthesized from verbal and behavioral data. The study concluded with three design principles: 1) the concept of financial planning is about people's expectation management, 2) a financial planning toolkit is designed under service systems, and 3) the tailor-made and modular design features can give financial advisors more flexibility to engage with senior people and enable them to share more about their life stories and needs to recommend financial planning packages precisely according to personal preference, health conditions, and financial status.

Half of the total greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of biodiversity loss come from resource extraction and processing. (EC 2020). To counter this, we must switch to sustainable, long-lasting products and slow down the use of resources. It is clear that these systems will not be fixed by incremental changes but by a series of disruptions. This article uses the Aristotelian causalities as a vehicle to break down the concept of “why” industrial design and discuss the underlying value propositions of distributed manufacturing. This critical perspective allows designers and engineers to bridge the knowledge-siloes and rewire the way a product is designed, sourced, built and consumed in relation to the four Aristotelian causalities. The paper discusses the limitations and potentialities for each causality in relation to a distributed manufacturing paradigm and argues for a new sustainable design concept: The Local Limited Edition. A site-specific product design, realised by brands to enrich brand value on local markets, improve market fit and increase attachment, ultimately improving the products' longevity and value of the products.

The overall strategy of designing is addressed. The design decisions that have a major impact on the direction in which the process evolves are termed “strategic”, and here we study them from the perspective of abduction. The aim is to clarify the role of abduction (in the sense of inference to the best explanation) in strategic decision making in design. Four cases are used for demonstration and discussion: functional decomposition in novel situations; the ordering of subfunctions in a function structure; the order of development of design tasks; and managing the design iterations. We focus on two specific design strategies: systematic design and parameter analysis, and show that strategic abductions often take place within the chosen strategy for the sake of efficiency of the process. Such abductions are often triggered by rules (like focusing first on the issue with greatest uncertainty in the total design task) that derive from Peirce's principle for economy of research. It is found that strategic abductions may have a decisive impact on the outcome of a design process. Two potential ways of improving design strategies and related strategic abductions are discussed.

Gaze sharing is an emerging technology which can enhance human communication and collaboration. As such, it is expected to play an important role in future educational practices. To date, its application was not explored in the context of design education. Additionally, it was mainly implemented in non-immersive environments, which are limited in their potential for engaging learners. Acknowledging the growing interest in immersive learning, as well as the promise made by gaze sharing technology, we strive to develop an immersive gaze sharing environment, to support design education. As a first step, we have implemented and tested an immersive gaze sharing system for supporting design learners. The system was then tested by focusing on a scenario of architectural design, with the aim of collecting valuable user feedback regarding its usability and potential. Our initial user study informs developers of such systems regarding potential issues that may be encountered during deployment in a real-world setting and proposes concrete ways to address these. These insights can help to pave the way for integrating gaze sharing system into design education practices in the near future.

Optimization-driven design offers advantages over traditional experience-based mechanical design. As an example, topology optimization can be a powerful tool to generate body shapes for Additive Manufacturing (AM). This is helpful, when (1) load paths are non-intuitive due to complex design domains or boundary conditions, or (2) the design process is to be automated to minimize effort associated with experience-based design. However, practically relevant boundary conditions are often difficult to put into a formal mathematical language to, for example, either feed it into a topology optimization algorithm, or provide precise quantitative criteria for CAE-supported manual design. This paper presents a survey of three industry use cases and identifies three types of requirements: the first can be directly cast into parts of an optimization problem statement (∼ 40%), the second is considered indirectly by adapting the optimization problem without explicit reference to the requirement (∼ 20%), and the third is only assessed after the design is finalized (∼ 40%). For categories 2 and 3 we propose directions of improvement to support formulating complex design tasks as unambiguous design problems.

This study is grounded upon the cognitive process and knowledge representation, analyzes the differences in perceptions between designers and users by applying schema theory. Per design process, we disassembled the semantic words that represent the design concept, and re-construct the representative visual imagery library. We experimented the imagery library with selective designers and users, and through their selections of the images, we uncovered: 1. The differences largely exist in concept interpretation and imagery selection between designers and users, which has strong relationship with their different schema; 2. The experiment revealed the fact that designers are inclined to understand the concept by disassembling the elements, and have obvious tendency of professionalism, while users’ interpretation prefers complete forms and life-oriented; 3. As compared with users, designers relatively prefer brand-new, creative elements in selecting visualized representation.