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The exploration of new materials has provided new insights into the progressive use of living biological materials in everyday designs. Living biological materials are expected to have the potential to overcome the depletion of non-renewable resources. Through bio-design and biophilic design in the urban environment, designers apply living systems as appropriate solutions to everyday designs. This paper aims to classify the biological materials and the sense of ownership towards biological materials embedded in products in terms of a) Function, b) Aesthetic and Semantic, and c) Emotion and Experience. A survey was conducted from 173 respondents through an online questionnaire. Keywords: biological materials; biophilic design; product designs; purposes and ownership eISSN: 2398-4287© 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v5i15.2479

Biophilia, biophilic design, bio-inspired and bio-design are design genres that adopted nature and biological elements as part of design processes. With the spread use of natural elements in design nowadays, from the analogical approach to the application of the biological materials in design brought up a different connotation towards the diverse use of nature in everyday life. This paper discusses the background knowledge of Biophilia, biophilic design, bio-inspired and bio-design and the application of biological materials in urban environments, especially for home. As part of a larger project on the application of biological materials in everyday products, this study investigates the emotional design and perception, while identifying the purposes of biological materials which incorporated into designs or systems. Data from 158 potential consumers were collected in an online survey specifically designed for this study, differentiating between design and non-design participants. Interesting findings are that more than 65% of non-design respondents are not aware of the terms biophilia and biophilic design, but they are familiar with the terms bio-inspired and bio-design. On the other hand, the potential consumers which are from non-design and design background as well agreed that having biological materials indoors, can a) help to release stress, b) create awareness of nature and ecological impact, c) can foster a sense of care, and d) can be educational.

Shared understanding is central to a design team's performance. While current literature describes general relationships between team interaction and the development of shared understanding, it is not known if or how dynamic patterns in team processes impact this. Using a comparative study, we describe dynamic process patterns that influence the relationship between collaborative design work and shared understanding development. We propose two major patterns that impact shared understanding development: taskwork-teamwork interdependency and inter-action heartbeat, and describe how what we term cross-level pattern alignment moderates their effect. We propose a conceptual model that integratesthese insights and provides testable propositions. As such, this work has significant implications for both design researchers and practitioners.

There is an increasing trend for designers to use living systems, through biodesign and biophilia in the urban environment. As new creative processes emerge, the perception and emotional responses of users towards these new systems are somewhat unknown. This paper aims to study the emotional responses and perceptions towards biological materials that are embedded in existing product designs. Data was collected from 58 respondents through an online questionnaire. The findings from this exploratory study show that the significant differences by comparing the respondents with a background in design and non-design towards the level of desirability, practicality, aesthetically pleasing and the common use towards artificial and real biological materials. This paper extends existing understanding of perception and emotional responses to design incorporated living systems and can begin validating existing studies which have brought different perspectives towards the functions, practicality, aesthetical value and emotional attachments of products.

Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of engineering design work. One key factor in the success of these teams is the development of short- and longer-term shared understanding. A lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context of globally distributed engineering activities. A major antecedent for shared understanding is question asking and feedback. Building on question-asking theory this work uses a quasi-experimental study to test the impact of questioning support on homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The results show significant improvement in shared understanding for both team types (27% improvement for heterogeneous and 16% for homogeneous), as well as substantial differences in how this improvement is perceived. This extends theoretical insight on the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams in the engineering design context. This has implications for how distributed teams can be more effectively supported in practice, as well as how shared understanding can be facilitated in engineering design.

The user experience of a product is recognized as having an increasing importance in particular in consumer products. Current approaches to designing user experiences are not easily translated to languages that a computer can understand. This paper examines a particular aspect of user experience, namely perception of the aesthetics of a product, to formalize this to rules, which are embedded into a tool to generate design. Investigating the perception of consumers is key to designing for their aesthetic preferences. Previous research has shown that consumers and designers often perceive the same products differently. This paper aims to embed rules on perception into a tool to support designers during design synthesis. Aesthetic design rules connecting perceptions with aesthetic features were integrated into a set grammar and a parametric modeling tool, and applied to the particular case of vases. The generated tool targeted the creation of vases with the perception of beautiful, elegant, and exciting. Results show that it is possible to generate beautiful, elegant, and exciting vases following the three aesthetic design rules, i.e., tall, simple, and curvy. The main contribution of this paper is the method used to incorporate information on perception into the set grammar and the parametric model. The tool is additionally proposed for supporting designers during design synthesis of shapes. The results are valid for vases but the method can be applied to other perceptions and product categories.

This research aims to understand the significance of biological-analogies in fostering novelty by comparing biological-analogies with other design methods for idea generation. Among other design methods, brainstorming was chosen here as benchmark. Four studies were conducted to compare: (i) the levels of abstraction at which concepts were ideated using biological inspiration (represented using biocards) with that using traditional brainstorming; and (ii) the novelty of concepts produced by using these two design methods. Concepts produced in these studies were evaluated for levels of abstraction at which they were ideated, average novelty, and proportion of high-novelty concepts. Results suggest that concepts generated using biocards were ideated at higher abstraction levels than those using brainstorming, but neither were at the highest abstraction levels. The average novelty of concepts produced using biocards was found to be greater than that using brainstorming; however, no statistically significant difference was found in the proportion of high-novelty concepts. We suspect the lack of biological knowledge and cultural difference among the subjects involved in our studies as the two reasons behind the results. The results demonstrate that the design methods substantially influence the novelty of concepts generated, while indicating the need for better training in effective use of biological-analogies.

Research in emotional design and Kansei Engineering has shown that aesthetics play a significant role in the appeal of a product. This paper contributes to establishing a methodology to identify the relationships between perceptions, aesthetic features, desire to own and background of consumers. Surveys were conducted with 71 participants to gather their perceptions of 11 vase concepts. Advanced statistical analyses, including mixed models, were applied to allow generalisation of the results beyond the data sample. Significant relations between the desire to own a product and how the product is perceived were found (the desire to own was found to be related to beautiful, expensive, elegant, exciting, feminine, common and dynamic vases), as well as between the perceptions and the parameters describing the form of the vases (a vase was perceived as beautiful if it had many curved lines and was simple and tall). An automated mixed model analysis was conducted and revealed that general rules can be found between aesthetic features, perceptions and ownership, which can apply across gender and culture. The findings include design rules that link aesthetic features with perceptions. These contribute to research as guidelines for design synthesis and can either be implemented via shape grammars or parametric modelling approaches. These rules are also interesting for 3D printing applications, especially important when the consumer is the designer. Some of these design rules are linked to the desire to own a product, they have implications for industry, and they offer guidelines to creating attractive products that people want to own.

Defining the aesthetic and emotional value of a product is an important consideration for its design. Furthermore, if several designers are faced with the task of creating an object that describes a certain emotion/perception (aggressive, soft, heavy, etc.), each is most likely to interpret the emotion/perception with different shapes composed of a set of different geometric features. The authors propose an automatic approach to formalize the relationships between geometric information of three-dimensional objects and the intended emotional content using fuzzy logic. In addition, the automatically generated fuzzy knowledge base was compared to the user's perceptions and to the manually constructed fuzzy knowledge base. The initial findings indicate that the approach is valid to formalize geometric information with perceptions and validate the author's manually developed fuzzy models.

Tools to aid designers achieve specific perceptions through the aesthetics of their products are needed in order to compete and stand out in the current consumer society. This research aims to develop a spatial grammar to include perceptions. This is conducted through a case study where rules from previous research are used to guide the spatial grammar development and generation of solutions. Results show that it is possible to develop a spatial grammar to design for perception rules extracted from consumers using Semantic Differential (SD) scales and advanced statistics. These elements combined can generate a tool that provides designers with many new aesthetically pleasing solutions. The Spapper module within the FreeCAD software is used for the implementation. Initial work examines only two perception rules (simplicity and tall), and shows the need for the third (curves) to obtain the expected results. Future work should focus on expanding the shapes available for generation (i.e. 3D primitives) to include spheres, ellipsoids, tori, revolved profiles and sweeps, which could increase the number of valid solutions.

This paper describes a study into industry perceptions of barriers and drivers for inclusive design. The study investigated perceptions of manufacturers and retailers of consumer products in the United Kingdom (UK) and compared their perceptions with those of companies in the United States (US) and Japan. It was found that the perceptions of major drivers for inclusive design were similar for manufacturers and retailers in the UK, but the perceptions of barriers to inclusive design differed between manufacturers and retailers. Industry attitudes towards legislation or government regulations in the UK differed from those in the US and Japan. The study concluded that ‘perception barriers' form the majority of the barriers and were the most significant, followed by ‘technical barriers’ and then ‘organizational barriers'. Consequently, strategies should focus on raising awareness to overcome perception barriers and providing supportive tools to overcome technical barriers.

This paper describes a study to understand the use of analogies by design engineers with different levels of experience in an adaptive design domain. Protocol analyses of 12 design engineers have been analyzed to understand the functions and reasoning of the analogies. The protocols are real-world data from the aerospace industry. The findings indicate a significant difference in both the use of analogies by novices and experienced designers and the reasoning from the analogies. Novices were found to predominantly transfer information related to the geometric properties without explicit reference to relevant design issues or to the appropriateness of applying the analogy, whereas experienced designers tended to use analogies for problem solving and problem identification. Experienced designers were found to use the analogy to reason about the function of a component and the predicted behavior of the component, whereas the novices seem to lack such reasoning processes.

This paper describes a software tool called DRed (the D esign R ationale ed itor), that allows engineering designers to record their design rationale (DR) at the time of its generation and deliberation. DRed is one of many proposed derivatives of the venerable IBIS concept, but by contrast with other tools of this type, practicing designers appear surprisingly willing to use it. DRed allows the issues addressed, options considered, and associated arguments for and against, to be captured graphically. The software, despite still being essentially a research prototype, is already in use on high profile design projects in an international aerospace company, including the presentation of results of design work to external customers. The paper compares DRed with other IBIS-derived software tools, to explain how it addresses problems that seem to have made them unsuitable for routine use by designers. In addition to the capture and presentation of the DR itself, the set of linked DR graphs can be used to provide a map of the contents of an electronic Design Folder, containing all the documents created by an individual or team during a design project. The structure of the knowledge model instantiated in such a Design Folder is described. By reprising a design case study published at the DTM 2003 conference, concerning the design of a Mobile Arm Support (MAS), the DRed knowledge model is compared with the previously proposed Design Data Model (DDM), to show how it addresses the shortcomings identified in the DDM. Finally the methodology and results of the preliminary evaluation of the use of DRed by aerospace designers are presented.Copyright © 2004 by ASME

The industrial world is changing rapidly and engineering organisations need to adapt fast to remain in business. Some of the pressures faced by engineering managers include: (1) the trend towards globalisation and the reliance on IT; (2) the increasing commercial pressures which demand continual improvements in quality, shorter lead times and reduced costs; (3) the increasing complexity of both products and processes; (4) the problems of retaining and retrieving knowledge and experience; and (5) the need to move towards sustainable development.

Users react to products without knowing the intended Kansei integrated into them by the designer. Human beings are equipped with variable preference mechanism. It is argued that human attributes result from three different levels of brain mechanism: the visceral; the behavioural; and the reflective levels. This paper focuses upon the visceral level through the building of a link between geometric properties of non-functional 3D forms and the human perception of these by users. This link is created using a genetic algorithm combined with a fuzzy logic decision support system. Human evaluations of the non-functional 3D shapes against two contrary perception adjectives (massive and light) are used as the learning data set for the genetic algorithm. Eight fuzzy models were developed using different sets of quantitative geometric properties as inputs resulting into different sets of fuzzy design rules. Correlations as high as 99%, between fuzzy and human perception, were obtained.

One of the motivations to develop a standard language to describe the functions of a product or artifact is to facilitate the indexing, search and retrieval of design knowledge. Taxonomies describing a standard language of functions have been developed by a number of researchers. This paper describes an empirical study carried out to evaluate two such taxonomies for their suitability to indexing design knowledge. The results of eighteen interviews conducted into two separate aerospace companies in the UK are presented. Engineering designers were asked to describe the function of assemblies or components that they were familiar with. In total, 207 descriptions of functions were collected. These descriptions have been analysed and compared to the two taxonomies evaluated. This paper describes the findings from these studies and draws conclusions on the suitability of these taxonomies for indexing design knowledge.Copyright © 2003 by ASME

This paper describes a study to understand the use of analogies by design engineers with different levels of experience. Protocol analyses of twelve design engineers have been analysed to understand the functions and reasoning of the analogies. The protocols are real world data from the aerospace industry. The findings indicate a significant difference in both the functions and reasoning by novices and experienced designers. Novices were found to predominantly transfer information without explicit reference to design issues, whereas experienced designers tended to either solve or identify problems. Experienced designers were found to reason about the function of a component and to some degree the predicted behaviour of the component, whereas the novices seem to lack such reasoning processes.Copyright © 2008 by ASME