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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

The delayed delivery, poor fitting and discomfort of customised orthoses are reported in rehabilitation clinics as resulting in more invasive interventions. The current practice of orthosis customisation relies heavily upon the experience and fabrication processes of therapists. In order to better understand the current practice, and thus identify data that is required for better comfort moving towards a data-driven customisation, this article describes a study generating working models of therapists. Customisations of hand and wrist orthoses for 18 patients were observed. Verbal protocol analysis was employed to extend the current understanding of fabrication processes. Working models of four therapists were established with quantitative evaluation on major phases, interactive activities and iterations of performing tasks during fabrication, revealing different working models between in- and out-patient departments (e.g. fabrication for in-patients was more complex and focussed on ergonomic fitting whereas fabrication for out-patients paid attention to durability) which were qualitatively explained. Practitioner summary: Fit and comfort are imperative for orthosis design and fabrication, however the current practice of customisation of an orthosis relies upon the experience of individual hand therapist. The article presents working models of hand therapists, and relevant data that would enable customisation of orthosis for better fit. Abbreviations: VPA: verbal protocol analysis; hw LTT: low temperature thermoplastic; ANOVA: analysis of variance.

Big data provides high volume of data to inform product customisation. Understanding which data is relevant remains a challenge. A method is proposed to identify relevant data to inform data-driven customisation. A case study regarding customisation of orthoses was conducted. Verbal protocol analysis was employed to extract time spent on major fabrication phases. Data related to patients, therapists and fabrication time was analysed. Results showed that the number of stabilised joints, experience of therapists and whether the design is for in- or out-patient are key factors for customisation.

Reasoning is a fundamental process in design activity, and it provides a way to understand design behaviour. Theories and models of design propose reasoning that follows abductive-deductive patterns. At the micro-level, these patterns are untested. This study analyses verbal reasoning patterns at the micro-level for group idea generation using protocol analyses of concurrent verbalisations from five design teams with industry participants. The results show that reasoning in design activity across 218 ideas follows general patterns of abductive-deductive reasoning. At the individual idea level, the reasoning patterns are disorderly and enter into micro-patterns of inference. The study concludes that understanding reasoning at early-stage idea generation processes is indicative of the mental models and abductive-deductive reasoning that are prevalent in design activity.

This article investigates the development and application of key performance indicators for global product development. Two in-depth, longitudinal case studies with multinational Danish manufacturing companies were conducted, and highlight how key performance indicators, typically used for collocated, cross-functional product development, do not provide the predictive insight required to avoid the additional risks encountered in the global product development environment. Grounded in the case study results and building on established methodologies in performance measurement literature, a framework was developed and validated in two additional Danish companies to support project managers to develop: preventive indicators, which support the avoidance of identified risks, and outcome indicators, which support the measurement towards the attainment of project objectives. The study is unique as it is one of the very few longitudinal studies of engineering design activities in a global context, providing the in-depth contextual understanding towards key risks and their influence on performance; an important step to support researchers and practitioners with the development of preventive measures.

Customized static orthoses in rehabilitation clinics often cause side effects, such as discomfort and skin damage due to excessive local contact pressure. Currently, clinicians adjust orthoses to reduce high contact pressure based on subjective feedback from patients. However, the adjustment is inefficient and prone to variability due to the unknown contact pressure distribution as well as differences in discomfort due to pressure across patients. This paper proposed a new method to predict a threshold of contact pressure (pressure limit) associated with moderate discomfort at each critical spot under hand orthoses. A new pressure sensor skin with 13 sensing units was configured from FEA results of pressure distribution simulated with hand geometry data of six healthy participants. It was used to measure contact pressure under two types of customized orthoses for 40 patients with bone fractures. Their subjective perception of discomfort was also measured using a 6 scores discomfort scale. Based on these data, five critical spots were identified that correspond to high discomfort scores (>1) or high pressure magnitudes (>0.024 MPa). An artificial neural network was trained to predict contact pressure at each critical spot with orthosis type, gender, height, weight, discomfort scores and pressure measurements as input variables. The neural networks show satisfactory prediction accuracy with ${R}^{{2}}$ values over 0.81 of regression between network outputs and measurements. This new method predicts a set of pressure limits at critical locations under the orthosis that the clinicians can use to make orthosis adjustment decisions.

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.

Additive manufacturing (AM) affords those who wield it correctly the benefits of shape, material, hierarchical, and functional complexity. However, many engineers and designers lack the training and experience necessary to take full advantage of these benefits. They require training, tools, and methods to assist them in gaining the enhanced design freedom made possible by additive manufacturing. This work, which is an extension of the authors’ previous work, explores if design heuristics for AM, presented in a card-based format, are an effective mechanism for helping designers achieve the design freedoms enabled by AM. The effectiveness of these design heuristic cards is demonstrated in an experiment with 27 product design students, by showing that there is an increase in the number of unique capabilities of AM being utilized, an increase in the AM novelty, and an increase in the AM flexibility of the generated concepts, when given access to the cards. Additionally, similar to the previous work, an increase in the number of interpreted heuristics and AM modifications present in the participants’ designs when they are provided with the heuristic cards is shown. Comparisons are also made between 8-heuristic and 29-heuristic experiments, but no conclusive statements regarding these comparisons can be drawn. Further user studies are planned to confirm the efficacy of this format at enhancing the design freedoms achieved in group and team design scenarios.

Many everyday tasks require physical contact with products, such as helmets, headsets, etc. There is a drive for comfortable products that fit the task and the human body, especially in the industry of external ear worn products. Past research on anthropometry stresses that positive comfort is enhanced when there is sufficient knowledge of human factors. The majority of these studies focus only on the acquirement and presentation of anthropometric data. This paper examines the incorporation of anthropometry in the design of external-ear devices. The aim of this paper is to provide different methods to support design applications (ways of analysis) of 3-dimensional head and ear data with a focus on external ear products. 200 persons representing the Danish population were scanned. The 3-d data was collected, refined and analysed. A matrix containing 29 new ear dimensions was generated. An analysis of the dataset through understanding of human and product geometry and methods of visualisation of the dataset generated an additional number of 9 advanced dimensions. The paper finally presents all phases of the analysis of the 3D data in the form of a methodological framework. The paper contributes with, in addition to the methodological framework, techniques to extract data based on a mathematical and product understanding, visualisation of data and manual extractions and how the data can be used to define archetypes for focus groups and other qualitative assessments. In their endeavour to develop successful and comfortable products designers should focus more on fitting the task into the human by benchmarking human dimensions against product data.

Designers at the conceptual phase of products such as headphones, stress the importance of comfort, e.g. executing comfort studies and the need for a reliable user panel. This paper proposes a methodology to issue a reliable user panel to represent large populations and validates the proposed framework to predict comfort factors, such as physical fit. Data of 200 heads was analyzed by forming clusters, 9 archetypal people were identified out of a 200 people's ear database. The archetypes were validated by comparing the archetypes' responses on physical fit against those of 20 participants interacting with 6 headsets. This paper suggests a new method of selecting representative user samples for prototype testing compared to costly and time consuming methods which relied on the analysis of human geometry of large populations.

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.

Bio-design is a novel frontier in design research. So far no methodology has been concieved for bio-design. A methodology would render the field more accessible by those without deep biology knowledge. Existing bio-design applications were reviewed and a novel classification scheme was proposed. The classification scheme forms the initial step towards the design methodology and is also a key contribution to the emerging field of bio-design.

This chapter provides insights into how open innovation and global product development can add value in a high value engineering environment, and how the impacts can be monitored and managed effectively. The chapter begins by introducing engineering design in a global context, and how open innovation approaches can support value creation and capture for high value engineering. It then highlights the importance and impact of strategic decision-making in global product development, utilising insights from global engineering companies to provide recommendations for managerial decision support. Finally, building on well-established concepts from performance measurement, a framework to support the development of key performance indicators in global engineering design projects is developed with its application exemplified in industry.

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.

PurposeCompanies are increasingly engaged with global engineering networks through offshoring of product development activities from R&D to production. This creates many new challenges as operations get physically and culturally decoupled. The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of how to effectively manage engineering offshoring activities in a context of global engineering networks. The main research question, therefore, is: “Can offshoring of engineering tasks be explained and managed using the concept of Global Engineering Networks (GEN)?” Effective approaches to handling the associated risks of engineering offshoring will be a key area of the investigation.Design/methodology/approachThe research approach is based on the engineering design research methodology developed by Blessing and Chakrabarti, including a descriptive phase and a prescriptive phase. Four case studies of large multinational corporations in Denmark were carried out. Data gathering was mainly documentary studies and interviews. The main data analysis approaches were coding (Strauss and Corbin) and pattern‐matching (Yin). The dataset was analysed using the GEN framework suggested by Zhang et al. and Zhang and Gregory.FindingsEngineering offshoring presents companies with challenges related to communication and knowledge sharing which is addressed through formal and informal mechanisms as well as a more streamlined operation. However, this did not remove the challenges. The GEN framework suggests a systematic approach to understanding global engineering networks through investigating their contextual features, critical capabilities to compete in a particular contextual circumstance, and configuration characteristics to deliver the capabilities. Using the GEN framework, the challenges faced by companies and the risks associated with their engineering offshoring activities can be explained as a mismatch between the required capabilities and the companies' ability to deliver these capabilities.Originality/valueThis paper provides new theoretical insight into both engineering offshoring and GEN theories by extending the GEN framework to address complications within engineering offshoring. This strengthens both academic fields, and will be able to help engineering managers to develop appropriate engineering network configurations for offshore engineering operations.

This paper develops an extension to established production- and supply chain management focused internationalisation models. It applies explorative case studies in Danish and Chinese engineering firms to discover how the globalisation process of product development differs from Danish and Chinese perspectives. The paper uses internationalisation and global product development theory to explain similarities and differences in the approaches. Grounded in case study results, a new model for internationalisation is proposed. The new model expands the internationalisation process model to include steps of product development and collaborative distributed development beyond sourcing, sales and production elements. The paper then provides propositions for how to further develop the suggested model, and how western companies can learn from the Chinese approaches, and globalise their product development activities from the front end of the value chain rather than from the back-end.

This paper focuses upon investigating the characteristics of engineering changes and identifying the main reasons for changes arising during the different phases of the lifecycle of complex engineering products. Two case studies representing products with different development processes have been selected and change documentation analysed. The two cases selected were: (1) a variant design product, an aeroengine and (2) a customised product, drilling equipment for the oil industry. The change requests were analysed to understand their distribution and motivation across the lifecycle of the two products. The findings show that change requests peak during the manufacturing phase and indicate that the motivation for change varies throughout a product's lifecycle. The results provide insights into the factors to be considered during the development process in order to reduce the number of change requests from the later phases of a product's lifecycle and to support designers to efficiently address the unavoida...

This paper aims to investigate the knowledge generated during the later phases of the life cycle of a complex customised product and understand how this knowledge is transferred between projects and between different user groups. A series of four identical rigs for offshore drilling was selected as a case study, and the transfer of knowledge between the first two rigs was explored through two sets of interviews with the rig operators and the project management team. The expected knowledge transfer strategies that emerged from the first set of interviews were analysed and compared with the actual transfer mechanisms identified in the second set of interviews, and similarities and differences were investigated. It was found that the transfer of knowledge primarily occurred within the individual phases of the product’s life cycle, and there was poor transfer across the different phases.

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.

This paper describes the findings from an empirical study carried out with engineers in senior roles within a large company manufacturing complex products. This research aimed to identify the types of knowledge that are important for design engineers. Twenty four knowledge categories were identified and the importance of these for design engineers in industry was investigated. In addition, the number of years of relevant experience required to become an expert in these types of knowledge was investigated. Knowledge related to the process was perceived as more important to those related to the product. However, the number of years to become an expert in process knowledge was found to be lower than for product knowledge, despite process knowledge being perceived as more important. The findings of this research contribute to the education and training of design engineers.

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.

The reuse of knowledge and information arising from the different phases of a product’s lifecycle is crucial for a company in order to achieve competitive advantage. This paper describes a case study from the oil industry investigating the transfer of knowledge within the service phase and also between the service and design phases. Interviews with engineering designers and service engineers were conducted. Knowledge arising from servicing the drilling equipment that was identified as relevant for service engineers was compared to that relevant for engineering designers. Furthermore, the mechanisms involved in the transfer of knowledge between service and design were investigated. Knowledge about changes, issues and improvements generated during service was found to be relevant to both groups; however, engineering designers were interested in knowledge of equipment at a component level whilst service engineers were more interested in obtaining an overview of the systems. The study showed that communication between the departments consisted prevalently of the service engineers pushing knowledge and information to the engineering designers. The reusing service knowledge (RSK) model is proposed based upon the findings and the understanding from a general framework for developing a knowledge management strategy. Additionally, the initial model was revised to explicitly address the factors that emerged from the case study. The RSK model was developed based on a case study from a customised industry; however, previous studies indicated that similar issues are also of relevance to a variant design industry.

This paper describes a methodology for developing ontologies for engineering design. The methodology combines a number of methods from social science and computer science, together with taxonomies developed in the field of engineering design. A case study is used throughout the paper focusing upon the use of an ontology for searching, indexing and retrieving of engineering knowledge. An ontology for indexing design knowledge can assist the users to formulate their queries when searching for engineering design knowledge. The root concepts of the ontology were elicited from engineering designers during an empirical research study. These formed individual taxonomies within the ontology and were validated through indexing a set of ninety-two documents. Relationships between concepts are extracted as the ontology is populated with instances. The identified root concepts were found to be complete and sufficient for the purpose of indexing. A thesaurus and an automatic classification are being developed as a result of this evaluation. The methodology employed during the test case is presented in this paper. There are six separate stages, which are presented together with the research methods employed for each stage and the evaluation of each stage. The main contribution of this research is the development of a methodology to allow researchers and industry to create ontologies for their particular purpose and to develop a thesaurus for the terms within the ontology. The methodology is based upon empirical research and hence, focuses upon understanding a user’s domain models as opposed to extracting an ontology from documentation.Copyright © 2005 by ASME

The long-term aim of this research is to develop a method to index design knowledge that is intuitive to an engineering designer and therefore encourage the reuse of information. Eighteen interviews were carried out to understand how designers described the process of designing a particular component or assembly. The analysis led to the development of a method of indexing design knowledge, which has been evaluated in two stages: (1) evaluation of individual taxonomies within the method; and (2) indexing of 92 reports using the method. The research contributes to the development of an ontology for engineering design.

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.

A long-term research project is being undertaken to understand how to support engineering designers through the provision of appropriate knowledge during the design process. Empirical research already carried out within the aerospace industry found that novice designers were aware of their knowledge needs in only 35% of their queries. In addition, observations of experienced and novice designers identified design strategies employed by experienced designers. The aim of this research was to develop and evaluate a method of support for designers based upon these findings. This paper describes the development of the method and its preliminary evaluation within the aerospace industry. The evaluation indicated that the method was able to reduce the number of inappropriate questions asked by novice designers.

The long-term aim of this research is to understand how to support designers through the provision of appropriate knowledge. This paper describes an empirical study that analysed the interactions between novice and experienced engineering designers in the aerospace industry. In total, 633 queries between novice and experienced designers were analysed. The analysis of the queries found that novice designers were aware of their knowledge needs in only 35% of their queries. The findings have implications for the type of support required by novice designers.

Research was undertaken to understand how to provide the most appropriate support for novice designers in engineering design. However, how designers apply their experience and knowledge is not understood and further research in this area is required. This paper describes an observational study to understand how novice and experienced designers approach design tasks.

Observational studies of engineering design activities can inform the research community on the problem solving models that are employed by professional engineers. Design is defined as an ill-defined problem which includes both engineering design and software design, hence understanding problem solving models from other design domains is of interest to the engineering design community. For this paper an observational study of two software design sessions performed for the workshop on “Studying professional Software Design” is compared to analysis from engineering design. These findings provide useful insights of how software designers move from a problem domain to a solution domain and the commonalities between software designers’ and engineering designers’ design activities. The software designers were found to move quickly to a detailed design phase, employ co-evolution and adopt a predominantly depth-first approach to developing their solutions. A mapping between the activities of engineering design onto the activities of a general model of software design is also presented. A discussion about the potential consequences of the key findings across the design domains is described.Copyright © 2012 by ASME

This paper investigates the impact on the product development process when a company offshores or outsources a part of it abroad. Data was collected through interviews conducted in fi ve companies. The study showed that the impact can be both negative and positive. The key impact was the possibility of a more complex development process due to cross-cultural virtual communication and collaboration. This meant a spiral development process is harder to offshore or outsource than a generic one. However, this complexity can be lessened by making the process or product simpler and by codifying and documenting processes and tasks to provide a common frame of reference.

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.

The aesthetics of a product influences the decisions made by consumers when purchasing products. Research has shown that designers are not always successful in creating a product with the desired perception amongst its users. Hence methods and tools which can support the designer in predicting how the aesthetics of their products are likely to be perceived are of value. In this paper the authors propose an approach to formalize the relationship between geometric information of a 3D object and the intended emotion using fuzzy logic. 3D objects (shapes) created by design engineering students to evoke a certain perception were analysed. Three different fuzzy logic models, with different input variables, for evaluating massiveness and lightness in a form are proposed. The authors identified geometric information as inputs of the fuzzy model and developed a set of fuzzy if/then rules to map the relationships between the fuzzy sets on each input premise and the output premise. In our case the output premise of the fuzzy logic model is the level of belonging to the design context (emotion). An evaluation of how users perceived the shapes was conducted to validate the fuzzy logic models and showed a high correlation between the fuzzy logic model and user perception. The models show the possibility of creating tools to support designers with forms to evoke the desired perceptions amongst consumers.Copyright © 2009 by ASME

This paper presents a comparison of two previous and separate efforts to develop an ontology in the engineering design domain, together with an ontology proposal from which ontologies for a specific application may be derived. The research contrasts an empirical, user-centered approach to developing the ontology engineering design integrated taxonomies (EDIT) with a theoretical approach in which concepts and relations are elicited from engineering design theories design ontology (DO). The limitations and advantages of each approach are discussed. The research methodology adopted is to map the ontology through examining each of the concepts and relations contained within each of the ontologies DO and EDIT with respect to the other. The comparison process results in an examination of both ontologies, with a few changes resulting from this. The importance of the two different approaches, one that is theoretically sound and another that is applicable, is recognized and argued. Finally, the merged ontology for engineering design is proposed as a template ontology that can be tailored by researchers and practitioners for a specific context.

It is widely recognized, both in industry and academia, that clear strategies in knowledge transfer positively influence the success of a firm. A firm should support the transfer of knowledge by standardizing communication channels within and across departments, based upon personalization, codification or a combination of these two strategies. The characteristics of the business influence the choice of communication channels used for knowledge transfer. This paper presents a case study exploring the transfer of knowledge within and across projects, specifically the transfer of service knowledge in the case of complex machinery. The strategies used for knowledge transfer were analysed and compared with the expected transfer mechanisms, similarities and differences were investigated and are described. A family of four identical rigs for offshore drilling was the selected case. The transfer of experience across the rigs during the commissioning phase of the first and the second rigs of the series was explored through interviews with the operators and the project management team. Differences between the expected knowledge transfer strategy, focused upon the moving of rig personnel and reusing of lessons learnt from one rig to the next, and the actual situation emerged. Various approaches for transferring knowledge were elicited and analysed with regard to the types of knowledge that were transferred and the context in which they were used. This study indicates factors that should be considered whilst designing a knowledge management system to support the systematic reuse of service knowledge.Copyright © 2009 by ASME

When developing procedures such as tools, methods and frameworks to support the development of new products, one of the challenges is ensuring their successful implementation. This paper describes a study of the development and use of such design-procedures with primary focus on the new product development process-model, its supporting methods and handling of knowledge. Semi-structured interviews with 20 participants have been carried out to understand the use of procedures. All the interviews were conducted in a company, which develops large complex equipment for oil rigs. The findings suggest that a complex understanding of procedures and reasons for divergence needs to be adopted, where implicit as well as explicit procedures are recognised and managed. Three distinct types of implicit procedures were uncovered through the study: 1) historical implicit procedures; 2) social interpretations of explicit procedures and; 3) implicit procedures supporting needs that are not catered for by the explicit procedures. In this understanding, a procedure can be any kind of method, tool or framework used to support design engineers. Furthermore, the study discusses a variety of recommended actions, depending on the type of procedure and the reason for non-conformance. Recommendations for corrective actions are proposed and feedback from managers directly involved in developing and applying the procedures are collected, to evaluate them.

This paper focuses upon understanding the characteristics of engineering changes, in particular changes that emerge during the service phase of complex products, and on how these changes can be related to the product development process. For this purpose, a set of engineering change reports from an aerospace engine has been analyzed and the findings have been compared with change documentation from drilling machinery for the oil industry. These findings give insights into which phases of the design process should be modified in order to reduce the number of change requests from the service phase and to enable designers to efficiently answer the unavoidable change requests. This can be used to improve the product development process in order to take into account the factors leading to changes.Copyright © 2008 by ASME