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One of the many features of three-dimensional printing (3DP) that contribute to its status as a cutting-edge technology is its positive impact on sustainability. Students in higher education can also use 3DP technologies to understand environmental, social, and economic issues. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how sustainability is integrated through 3DP in higher education, especially in developing countries. Thus, this research explored the teaching of sustainability through 3DP in five public engineering universities in Vietnam using field observations (75 students and five educators), followed by semi-structured interviews with ten students and five educators. The findings revealed that sustainability through 3DP was not taught as a separate unit in the participating institutions as they were not equipped with the necessary tools and software to educate students about sustainability through 3DP, the time spent teaching students about 3DP was limited, and most of the educators were not trained in implementing sustainability through 3DP in higher education. Despite these barriers, students were instructed on how to use 3DP materials economically and were taught which materials were beneficial for the environment. In cases of limited resources and funding, assisting students in assembling low-cost do-it-yourself 3D printers by utilizing open-source materials will maximize their learning outcomes. These findings may help higher education institutions teach sustainability through 3DP and motivate students to explore multidisciplinary knowledge in developing countries. This study also guides both higher education sectors and policymakers on taking the steps necessary for utilizing the benefits of 3DP in engineering education.

Digital design tools have dominated engineering and design practice offering many advantages that ultimately improve efficiency in the design process. Digital sketching is one such example of these tools yet, its current use is primarily to present work to stakeholders (External Communication). It is relatively underused to externalise ideas (Externalisation) where sketching on paper is still favoured. This paper aims to understand the characteristics of digital sketching that motivate or discourage designers to use the tool. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 designers to gain insights on the tool's use in External Communication and Externalisation. Results highlight a trade-off between fidelity of visualisations and time and effort expended to achieve visualisations. The key difference between the use scenarios is the way in which this trade-off is connected to managing stakeholder involvement. While designers acknowledge advantages that digital sketching can offer in externalisation, it is viewed as requiring a level of detail to begin use. In conclusion we suggest segmenting roles of digital sketching in terms of the characteristics identified in this study would help to motivate use in Externalisation.

Numerous visualisation tools based on digital and cross-reality (XR) platforms are emerging in industrial design. They offer new possibilities and promising advantages to the designers but also raise challenges for design education. This study investigates the learning experience of emerging tools in education and its influences on tool-use behaviours and attitudes in design practice. Digital sketching is selected for the case study as the emerging tool compared to more established tools (e.g., traditional sketching and CAD). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 practising designers to compare their learning experience of digital sketching versus traditional sketching and CAD modelling in formal education. Results indicate that designers’ learning experience in education can have an influence on not only their skill sets but also attitudes towards engaging with emerging visualisation tools as they progress in their careers. The study suggests that embracing emerging design visualisation tools in education now is essential for helping our future designers be more resilient and flexible with tool selection and use in their future design practice.

The concepts of high-velocity, complexity and interdependency are nowadays vividly discussed in design-led innovation management. Design organisations seek to manage innovation in a more dynamic way to ensure competitive advantage and long-term competitiveness. Contextual ambidexterity is advised to be a dynamic capability that can facilitate firms to effectively manage incremental and radical innovation alike. This paper proposes an approach that focuses on the individual and the underlying thinking which bases its foundations on ambidextrous leadership, abductive reasoning and strategic fit.

Visualisation of ideas and emergent designs is an essential ingredient in design practice. Sketching and CAD represent two widely used visualisation tools, each with complementary affordances that dictate their typical use during the design process. Sketching has affordances of fast and fluent visualisation whereas CAD affords easy modification of detailed designs. This paper proposes a hybrid tool, Digital Sketch Modelling, investigating the extent to which it can deliver complementary affordances of both sketching to CAD. Analysis of diary entries made by 62 postgraduate designers using sketching, digital sketch modelling and CAD within a design project forms the basis of the study. Results illustrate how digital sketching over crude 3d digital models, combined with benefits of digital image editing software enhance affordance for easy visualisation of ideas. Concurrently, the level of software used in Digital Sketch modelling led to fewer concerns over the level of difficulty to modify designs, enhancing the affordance for easy modification. As such we conclude Digital Sketch Modelling does combine affordances indicating its potential benefit in use between sketching and CAD.

The prospect of autonomous vehicles and associated technologies has disrupted traditional modes of vehicle operation and ownership. This requires automotive designers to shift their focus from designing vehicle form to consider the design of transport experiences. As such, there is a need to explore how best to support automotive designers in communicating user experiences (UX) alongside the physical design of vehicles. This paper presents an industry case study conducted with Ford Design Asia Pacific to assess the embodiment of UX in early concepts. Attributes of generalised model for UX are mapped to designers' storyboard illustration for the experience of an advanced concept for an autonomous vehicle interior. Results show how a mix of captions, sketches of users and contextual features illustrate different attributes of user experience. From findings we conclude firstly, the need to develop a toolkit to help designers communicate descriptions of as yet designed interactions. We also conclude that sketching contextual features of experience can provide a starting point to develop aspects of UX that can be used to differentiate and identify the Ford brand.

To be successful in innovation, organisations need to be dynamically adaptable to novel situations to avoid getting ‘left behind’. Yet, they face vast uncertainties stemming from unforeseeable technological shifts or future user and market behaviour, making strategic decision-making on innovation an extremely difficult task. Decision-makers thus increasingly try to control or shape the future, rather than foresee it. This includes thinking ahead and generating potential pathways that will make an innovation viable. This captures the essence of designerly ways of thinking in reasoning toward ‘what might be’. Extant literature has been reviewed that discusses alternative strategies how this future-oriented thinking can be applied to become better at selecting novel ideas for development. We observe parallels between divergent thinking, abductive reasoning, analogising and lateral thinking suggested by different authors in this process. The paper continues to propose how these key mechanisms can be embedded within an existing framework for decision-making under uncertainty, the ‘OODA Loop’, which has seen increasing uptake in such decision-making scenarios.

In Industrial Design, new design visualisation tools are emerging offering significant benefits to the designers. However, studies show alongside some benefits, new tools can also inhibit designers' creativity or cause time inefficiency if used in the wrong context. Thus, understanding which tools to use and when during the design process is increasingly necessary to ensure the best use of resources in design practice. Existing research on understanding the performance of design tools and the resulting frameworks for comparing tools are either specific to certain tools or highly generalised making evaluation across different design tools challenging. As such, this paper reports the creation of a more comprehensive framework of design tool characteristics to facilitate a better understanding of design tools and their uses. Demonstration of application of the framework is also given in the form of a case study on the use of Digital Sketching and its comparable tools with four practising designers. In conclusion, we show how the Design Tool Characteristics (DTCs) framework is an effective way to understand design tools, with further implications for design tool development.

Science and technology generated by Universities has many challenges in reaching commercial product applications, as has been explored in a range of literature. Product design has been identified to add value through various types of contributions in addressing these challenges; however, there remains a gap in literature to explore how and when product development activities can practically be applied to technology development.This paper furthers the idea that the product development process can help bridge the gap between the laboratory and commercial applications by proposing a framework for how Ulrich and Eppinger's product development process can integrate with the STAM technology development model. This is a significant step towards understanding how in practice these disciplines can work together to bring science and technology from the laboratory to products in the marketplace.

This paper introduces Hybrid Prototyping as a way to couple different prototyping methods; combining their complementary affordances and mitigating their limitations. To characterise and investigate this approach, a simulation-based study was conducted into the coupling of low-cost 3D printing and LEGO®. Key benefits hypothesised are reduced fabrication time and increased reconfigurability. Six primitive 3D shapes are simulated using a continuum of hypothetical brick sizes. Results show a reduction in fabrication time of 45% and a reconfigurability of 57% at the optimum. A case study highlights the compounded improvements over 3D printing for an iterative prototyping process. These findings mean that increases in prototyping iterations can be made due to reduced time and material costs, accelerating the product development process.

Novice design students struggle to engage with early stage design visualization tools such as sketching and prototyping. Instead students have a preference for designing with digital tools such as CAD modelling, motivated by inhibitions around sketching skill, which in turn leads to fixation and sunk cost effects. These behaviors present a barrier to engaging in typical practices of expert designers, namely idea fluency described as generating a wide range of ideas quickly and avoiding favoring one single idea. Noting the recent success of LEGO Serious Play in engaging non-designers in design activities in business and innovation contexts, we explore whether using LEGO as a visualization tool can trigger a behavior change in student designers towards idea fluency. This paper presents a study comparing student attitudes and design behavior when designing with LEGO, in comparison to sketching and cardboard modelling. Findings illustrate how LEGO’s comparative low fidelity leads to students to be more willing to change and modify initial ideas, reduces inhibitions related to visual quality, and reinterpret and iterate designs. Based on these findings we illustrate how designing with LEGO can mitigate issues of inhibition, fixation, and sunk cost design behaviors concluding that LEGO can trigger behavior change toward idea fluency. As such we see compelling evidence to integrate LEGO as an educational design activity for novice designers used early in the design process to illustrate and trigger idea fluency.

Crisis-driven innovation demands new organizational capabilities. Evidence in the literature shows that abductive reasoning is beneficial in situations where uncertainties and unknowns prevail. Indeed, current times mirror those characteristics extremely well and demand a new way of thinking. This chapter draws parallels between foresight strategies in disaster management (DM) and innovation management (IM). It investigates characteristics of the former to inform the way abductive reasoning can deliver dynamic capability for design organizations in the latter. With the intent to add knowledge to the IM literature and support organizations to drive innovation, we propose the Future-Led Innovation (FLI) framework to actually operationalize abductive reasoning to thereby help design companies acquire capabilities to become better at IM. This is meant to support innovation managers through the process in decision-making instances and overcome the “Analysis paralysis” bias to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, high-velocity market, and radical ideas.

Innovation ecosystems and their prosperity have drawn increasing interest in research and practice. Through a literature review, diversity in terms of the types of collaborators and the nature of interactions are identified as key ingredients for innovation ecosystems to thrive. Co-creation practices and culture help coping with inherent, added complexities in the collaboration among actors and create more sustainable, mutually beneficial value for all stakeholders in the ecosystems.

The act of prototyping is more than the artefact produced – the process helps answer design questions. A knowledge of prototyping activities leads to better decisions in the design process. The aim of this paper is to characterise and compare prototyping techniques. A literature review explores current research into characterising prototypes, before highlighting the need for comparison. A study is reported that compares the design activity of sketching, CAD, cardboard and LEGO when used as prototypes in a group design task, showing differences in the levels of different design activities.

Within design research several well-known principles have been identified that influence aesthetic pleasure for product designs. More specifically, these design principles indicate an optimal balance on a certain design attribute that receives the highest aesthetic pleasure (e.g., Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable). While these go far in explaining the effects of design on appraisal, the nature of the stimuli used in these studies makes it difficult to identify exactly where this optimal balance lies and thus does not inform a designer on how to adjust a given attribute to create an aesthetically pleasing product design. In this study, we conduct a meta analysis on one such study exploring the design principle Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable and demonstrate the application of shape comparison tools in relating the sweet-spot in terms of changes in product shape. Results from the application show the way in which quantifying difference in shape can help to identify aspects of shape where minor changes result in substantial increases/decreases in aesthetic pleasure, as well as its use in relating a value of difference to optimum values of aesthetic pleasure.

This paper presents a technique to investigate the influence of aesthetic features and brand recognition of vehicles. Appearance has been shown to impact greatly on consumer perception of products and their branding, yet there exist few tools or methods to support reasoning about their influence. A procedure for visually decomposing designs into constituent aesthetic features is proposed. The strategy is applied to a range of saloon cars, and a consumer survey undertaken to establish the significance and potency of individual aesthetic features. Results both validate the decomposition technique and highlight certain aesthetic features that have the greatest influence on brand recognition.

Due to modern medicine, the lifespan of the average person is increasing, with a concomitant increase in the need for care. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, DeStatis, there will be a deficit of 260,000 caregivers by 2025, which is not only an issue in Germany, but worldwide. New technologies, including wearable devices, will be crucial to manage this challenge, but there is a huge amount of research and investment required to incorporate wearable assistive devices into the lives of elderly users. It is crucially important that any new devices are fit for purpose, taking into account the specific needs of elderly people. This chapter, therefore, summarises and reviews the current state of wearable assistive devices, formalises the current design practice with respect to user needs, and presents design considerations such as wearability and usability, in order to assist in the future development of wearable assistive devices for the aging population.

Product appearance is known to significantly influence market success of a product. Guidelines exist to direct designers as to whether a product should have a more similar or different appearance, in order to fit different marketing strategies. These guidelines are subjective and as such can be difficult for designers to apply when evaluating similarity/difference in the context of specific products being designed. This paper reports an exploratory study of the use of shape descriptors (previously used to search/match 3D digital models), to provide objective measures (benchmarks) for product shape in terms of similarity and difference. Following a case study of beer bottle shapes, it was shown that such descriptors can be used to provide measures for typical deviation in shape for certain product categories. Therefore these measures may form benchmarks for styling of new designs and communicating degree of difference in appearance.

Product appearance and in particular its association with branding has been shown to play an increasingly important role in the commercial success of mature mass-market products. This paper presents a novel approach to analyse product appearance and explore similarities between products. The approach is applied to two contemporary industrial examples, smartphones and vehicles, and the outcome used to explore the strategic use of visual references to brand in product appearance. Results from the method’s application validate the method in providing insights in terms of specific similarities in appearance. Further interpretation is then used to recommend possible design strategies with respect to the use of visual references to brand.

Styling is an important aspect of the design process in which the overall appearance of a product is developed and the visual appeal is achieved. However, styling decisions are often subjective and can be difficult to satisfy the needs for all stakeholders. In this paper an exploratory study is discussed that aims to address the subjectivity of styling rationale by quantifying aspects of product appearance through the use of eye tracking. Two research questions are addressed that relate closely to typical styling issues; how are products compared when determining similarity? And, what patterns of feature engagement exist in pairwise comparisons? Preliminary findings show a weak effect between feature engagement and the similarity ratings of product pairs. Recommendations are made in the paper on the practical implementation of eye-tracking to support styling decisions as well as experimental refinements to elucidate behavioural patterns during pairwise comparisons.