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Disability has been redefined by the World Health Organization as a function of a person’s interaction with the environment and not merely an innate part of a person. This redefinition highlights the need for inclusiveness in design solutions. To aid this, we apply and test the potential of different tools that restrict designers’ physical abilities at deriving inclusive design perspectives among designers. Various tools and simulated conditions are often adopted in user-centered design to sup-port need-finding by eliciting rich data on users’ needs and guide designers to empathize with users. Simulation tools that restrict designers’ physical abilities have been applied to understand certain perspectives of people with physical challenges, yet these tools lack the ability to evoke an inclusive design perspective among designers. Through a co-creation workshop, participants were exposed to two forms of simulations: direct and situational physical impairments. This was achieved using different tools that simulate the same physical restriction. In this study, a noise- canceller and earphones were used to simulate a reduced hearing attention. Participants were asked to generate user needs and design functions by applying both the simulation tools. The study results comprise the outcomes of 33 participants who volunteered to participate in a co-design workshop that provided a venue for them to interact and work alongside users with physical challenges. This paper analyses the inclusiveness attained through different types of simulated conditions. With a growing need to create tools and technologies that delight the user, it is necessary to equip designers with the tools that would help them with the process. The study demonstrates the application and impact of one such tool.

Abstract Nearly every artifact of the modern engineering design process is digitally recorded and stored, resulting in an overwhelming amount of raw data detailing past designs. Analyzing this design knowledge and extracting functional information from sets of digital documents is a difficult and time-consuming task for human designers. For the case of textual documentation, poorly written superfluous descriptions filled with jargon are especially challenging for junior designers with less domain expertise to read. If the task of reading documents to extract functional requirements could be automated, designers could actually benefit from the distillation of massive digital repositories of design documentation into valuable information that can inform engineering design. This paper presents a system for automating the extraction of structured functional requirements from textual design documents by applying state of the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. A recursive method utilizing Machine Learning-based question-answering is developed to process design texts by initially identifying the highest-level functional requirement, and subsequently extracting additional requirements contained in the text passage. The efficacy of this system is evaluated by comparing the Machine Learning-based results with a study of 75 human designers performing the same design document analysis task on technical texts from the field of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS). The prospect of deploying such a system on the sum of all digital engineering documents suggests a future where design failures are less likely to be repeated and past successes may be consistently used to forward innovation.

Abstract The aesthetics of a product is critical to its desirability, and can be described in terms of syntactics and semantics. Syntactic aesthetics is an objective description based on the form and configuration of a product, while semantic aesthetics is a subjective interpretation of the form and gestalt of a product. This study seeks to identify a set of syntactic attributes to describe form and understand if an individual’s preferences for a form are consistent from one product to another. Form attributes from previous literature were expanded upon to create a consistent vocabulary for syntactic aesthetics that can be used to describe multiple products. Combinations of four selected attributes are utilized to describe a diverse set of designs for two products: vases and canopies. Conjoint analysis is used to quantitatively measure the form preferences of individuals towards different combinations of attribute levels of the objects. Results from conjoint analysis applied to vase and canopy designs indicate a 61.3% consistency of individual form preferences between the products. It is hoped that this methodology can help designers develop aesthetically consistent products that align with users’ preferences by quantifying users’ aesthetic preferences towards products through a vocabulary for syntactic attributes.

AbstractEngineering design often requires engaging with users, clients, and stakeholders of products and systems. It is therefore important for designers to reflect on the societal and environmental implications of their design work so that they can design equitably, ethically, and justly. We conduct a review of three leading scholarly engineering design publications to investigate how, when, and why these terms—“ethics,” “equity,” and “justice,” and variations—appear in the engineering design literature and what scholars mean when they use them. We find that these terms are minimally present within the field's scholarship and posit that design researchers may be using other terms to refer to their work that is aligned with principles of ethics, equity, and justice. We find that the prevalence of these terms has increased over time and that the terms come up throughout various stages of the design process. There appear to be a variety of motivations for including these terms, notably, sustainability and education of the next generation of designers. Finally, we propose an expanded design justice framework that is specific to engineering design. We encourage designers in our field to adopt this framework to assist them in thinking through how their engineering design work can be used to advance justice.

Abstract There is an urgent need to provide ways to help a fast-growing older adult population to maintain daily mobility. A great deal of work exists in medical devices and robotics to generate effective assistive solutions, yet at the same time, limits have been observed in the adoption of such systems. In this paper we explore possible factors in adoption from a user-centered design perspective. We investigated user needs surrounding the act of standing up from a seated position and older users’ attitudes toward assistive device prototypes. Older adults completed a standard timed-up-and-go mobility assessment, rated their own difficulty standing, participated in interviews, and shared responses to “look-and-feel” prototypes, all in an effort to uncover latent needs. A licensed physical therapist rated videos of the subjects while standing up and the two ratings were compared. While the physical therapist’s rating of difficulty increased as subjects’ performance on the clinical mobility assessment worsened, subjects’ self-ratings did not significantly correlate with mobility performance, even when timed-up-and-go performance indicated a risk of falling. Subjects expressed preferences for potential assistive devices that were more discreet, lightweight, and flexible over devices that were bulkier, heavier, and rigid. In general, subjects’ attitudes toward assistive devices for their own sit-to-stand use were similar regardless of their demonstrated need. The results highlight the challenges designers may face when creating products for older adult users and underline the importance of a user-centered design process. Implications for assistive technology design are discussed.

Abstract Digital tools for sketching, such as tablets, have become popular for streamlining design work and keeping a large quantity of sketches in one place. However, their impact on design creativity, novelty, and concept evolution is not yet well understood. Here, we present a controlled human subjects study that assesses the influence of tablets (iPads) on concept novelty and evolution in the context of an engineering design concept generation exercise. We expect that iPad use will not influence concept novelty due to its similar speed of use as pen and paper sketching. We expect to see different patterns in concept evolution between the two types of tools, namely, that iPad users will demonstrate more iteration on a concept (concept evolution) than pen and paper users due to the fact that iPad features make it easy to copy and paste previous sketches and then modify them. We find that the tool used is not correlated with concept novelty. Additionally, we find no strong differences in overall concept evolution quantities between the two tools, though we see that iPad sketches exhibited more cases of consecutive concept evolution than nonconsecutive whereas paper and pen sketches showed an equal amount of both consecutive and nonconsecutive concept evolution. Results indicate that overall, iPads may not significantly inhibit designers’ creative skills and thus could be a reasonable replacement for pen and paper sketching, which has implications for both design education and practice.

Abstract Sketching is an important tool for engineers during concept generation. Sketch quantity during this early stage of design has been linked with eventual design outcomes and sketch quality has been linked with design perceptions. As such, both are important metrics to track. Prior work has also found gender differences in some of these sketch attributes. Given the increase in use of digital tablets for sketching, it is important to assess how tablet use affects early stage engineering design sketches. This is especially important as tablets can automatically smooth lines and help perfect sketch features, but these features may also take longer to use and may result in fewer sketches produced. This study investigates differences in sketch quality, quantity, and understandability (the effectiveness of the sketch as a communication tool) between sketching on a tablet and sketching with pen on paper during an engineering design concept generation exercise. Results indicate that there is no difference in sketch quantity or understandability between the two tools. However, sketch quality, smoothness, and proportion/accuracy are all higher for the pen and paper condition than for the tablet condition. Finally, no gender differences in performance for either sketch quantity or quality were found.

This study examines the organizational transformation of digital design platforms (DDPs) to present the considerations of DDPs’ value propositions, service offering, and sustainable business models. When we face large, complex, systemic transformational challenges, especially during the pandemic, we must make meaningful changes to a DDP to rise to these social-technological challenges internally and externally to generate positive social impacts and create value for design individuals and communities. Due to COVID-19, people’s daily lives, interactions, and work experiences, and communication patterns dramatically changed, which significantly influenced organizations across scales and industries. DDPs have also been hit by the social-technological impact of COVID-19. We conducted seven semi-structured expert interviews and demonstrated ten case studies across three categories: design competitions, design professional associations, and design companies about DDP transformation associated with COVID-19 through the lens of system engineering. The goal is to analyze organizational change and its impacts on a DDP’s service offering, business model, and organizational culture, in an effort to better prepare new capabilities in the era of social-technological transformation. We identified four key takeaways: (1) craft new partnership connections; (2) identify criteria for transformation; (3) create and extend participants’ engagement level, and (4) leverage collective talents and sources.

AbstractService design has been an emerging transdisciplinary field that includes product, system, and social science, since the term was first introduced to academic research in the early 1990s. With socioeconomical shifts and emerging technologies, people have faced more complex and systemic challenges, which enable researchers to consider how to reapply service design not only as problem-solving tools but also as ways for communication and alignment to adapt to the change. The study focuses on the paradigm shifts of service from its definitions to applications by interviewing nine design experts from academia and industry, and utilizing survey results to help us explore applying service design to solve complicated social-technological challenges. We present four takeaways: 1) a new understanding of service design, 2) the purpose of using service design tools, 3) the evaluation of service quality through time, and 4) the applications of service design in the public sector. We proposed a macro-trend model with service systems: product, service, and experience to conclude 1) constructing service systems in the macro-trend context and 2) gaining holistic views and building service implementation capability in the era of transformations.

Abstract Engineering designers often span knowledge boundaries when developing complex systems but doing so poses challenges because members of different knowledge groups must bridge their language, cognitions, and “thought worlds” to effectively broker, resituate, and make use of each other’s ideas. Objects — ranging from prototypes to kanban boards to value stream maps — are frequently used in cross-functional design practice, but the outcomes associated with such objects appear varied and dependent not only the objects’ characteristics but on how, when, and by whom they are used. This paper describes a two-year inductive ethnographic study within a turbomachinery design company to understand how cross-functional design teams span their knowledge boundaries to advance their designs and design processes. We collected observations of 70 cross-functional meetings and 52 interviews across functional groups during the development of complex turbomachinery products. Our findings include three roles of objects of collaboration: routinizing cross-boundary interaction, translating information across boundaries, and motivating joint negotiation or discovery. We found two prominent outcomes — co-discovery of a design risk, opportunity, or workflow bottleneck and co-design of a joint integrated solution — that appeared to follow from the latter two roles, respectively. These findings are significant because they clarify the roles of objects in cross-boundary design work and suggest ways for designers to more effectively use objects to span knowledge boundaries.

Abstract System Engineering education typically includes content to help students learn to design and engineer large, complex systems in a structured way. In this paper, we describe the outcomes of introducing a human-centered design tool, the Inspiration Design Toolkit (IDT), to encourage students to think non-linearly. The IDT is an educational resource consisting of a deck of illustrated cards that contain provocative questions, reflection messages and icons, applicative examples, and key takeaways on microlearning units. The aim of the IDT is to improve the participants’ learning experience and course engagement, increase opportunities for them to interact with their peers and teaching team, enable them to practice and reinforce the concepts through the creation of their own IDT cards, and share the cards in the discussion to increase learners’ engagement with course material and peers. We designed the IDT for an MIT online course on System Thinking. We collected, analyzed, and synthesized qualitative and quantitative feedback from 171 course participants. Our findings suggest that IDT provides learners with a digital asset that allows them to reinforce and recall the course takeaways, and apply them to other contexts. For future research, we want to understand how learners like and use IDT through demographic differences and preferred self-identified learning styles. We discuss how these findings may help educators consider critical design principles and for creating a digital self-learning toolkit connected to the course content and increasing its content adaptability.

Abstract Within higher education, there are increasing calls for design-focused fields, such as engineering and urban planning, to incorporate social, policy, and ethical considerations into their courses to create and develop more responsible, society-minded designers to solve today’s complex societal issues. At the same time, not all instructors of design courses may feel equipped or comfortable engaging social, policy, and ethical considerations in their courses. Previous work has shown that engineering courses engage less with these considerations than other design fields. More perspectives are necessary to understand how instructors consider engaging these considerations and their motivations behind it. We present a survey of instructors regarding their curricular practices and goals as they relate to social, policy, and ethical considerations to understand the barriers, resources, and changes of these considerations in design education. Our results demonstrate there is an increased awareness for the need for this type of content that is promising for the future of engaging social, policy, and ethical considerations in design curriculum. However, for those instructors interested in including such considerations there are barriers such as the identifiable relevance, lack of time and educational materials inhibiting their inclusion. This can be supported by more educational resources, financial support, and prioritization in design education.

AbstractDesign and engineering are socio-technical enterprises used to solve real-world problems. However, students in these fields are often under-equipped to consider the ethical and societal implications of their work. Our prior work showed that these societal considerations are more consistently embedded in design pedagogy in non-engineering than in engineering courses at MIT. Here, we examine underlying causes for this through a survey of instructors (231 courses from 29 departments). The main contribution of this work is an analysis of whether and how instructors incorporate social, ethical, and policy considerations in design pedagogy. The majority of respondents (60.6%) included these topics in their courses, primarily through discussion of social justice, identity groups, and ethics. These concepts were included more in non-engineering courses (65.8%) than engineering courses (46.9%). Many instructors, especially in engineering, cited irrelevance as the reason for not engaging with these topics in their courses (86.1% compared to 44.2% in non-engineering). We suggest that instructors question this perception and use the examples provided as a starting point to explore integration of these concepts into their technical content.

Hardware-based startups risk having longer times-to-market, deterring investment in the clean technologies that are critical to a sustainable future. We interviewed 55 leaders at hardware startups, 20 of which are cleantech, mapped their development timelines, and found prototyping to be the longest development step (median of 19 weeks per prototype) regardless of prototype complexity or iteration. Qualitative interview analysis reveals the prototyping team’s choice of development style is a major factor affecting timeline. We define two development styles: natural and structured, typified by free-form exploration and rule-based execution, respectively. On average, natural development takes 35% less time than structured, and is thus preferred for early iterations, but adopting structure at strategic points is needed for timely commercialization. Critical points of transition to a structured style include adding new team members or engaging external partners, which demand clear communication and expectations. When pivoting to a new product or market, returning to a natural style is beneficial.

AbstractThe 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.

Abstract Sketching is often used as a tool during idea generation in the early stages of engineering design. At the same time, the rapid increase in remote engineering and design work paves the way for an increased reliance on digital design tools and technologies throughout the design process. Sketch quality and quantity have been shown to be linked to design perceptions and design outcomes. Additionally, sketch quality and style have been linked with the gender of the sketcher. Thus, there are financial, social, and ethical motivations for understanding how digital design tools influence sketching during early stages of engineering design. In this study, we investigate the influence of hand sketching on a tablet as compared to pencil or pen and paper on early stage sketching for concept generation. We also assess the influence of gender on sketching attributes. We ask three mixed gender groups of participants (using pen, pencil, and a tablet) to sketch concepts in response to an open-ended design prompt. We hypothesize that participants using tablet and pencil will produce fewer drawings than those using pen due to their ability to erase and focus on perfecting drawings, and we expect participants using the tablet to produce cleaner drawings with smoother strokes due to the tablet’s ability to auto-smooth lines. Based on prior literature, we posit that women and gender minorities will produce fewer sketches and use the feathering style of sketching more than men. We find that sketch quality is highest for pencil drawings and lower for tablet and pen drawings. We also find that concept novelty is negatively correlated with how understandable the concept is. Participants reported that experiences of drawing on paper and on the tablet differ in terms of missing the feeling of friction on the tablet and finding that too many features in a tool can be distracting during concept generation. Interestingly

Abstract There is a growing movement in engineering and industry for students and practitioners to learn to embrace failure and develop resilience. The design process is naturally full of iteration and failures that can inherently be leveraged as learning opportunities for students. This study establishes a set of failure-related interventions implemented in an introductory design course, and then examines potential links to students’ experiences and attitudes towards failure. These interventions included a failure-themed “speaker seminar” series, a virtual gallery of design mistakes (“mistake museum”), and the introduction of a prototype logger for students to intentionally reflect on each iteration of their own design projects, including what went wrong and what was learned from the iteration. Students found these interventions to be effective in gaining perspective on failure and learning to embrace it. Students’ perceptions of the openness to failure of the class, perceptions of the field of design’s openness to failure, and perceptions of their major’s openness to failure all changed significantly, while their perceptions of their own openness to failure and their academic institution’s openness to failure were unchanged over the duration of the design course. Students also self-reported that the reflective processes of logging prototypes made them feel more comfortable with failure.

Abstract Designers routinely create informal “thinking” sketches to explore a design space, “talking” sketches to communicate design ideas during the early phases of the design process, and “learning” prototypes to test potential concepts. This study presents two new tools to assess novice designers’ sketch attributes and prototyping reflections in the context of an introductory design course. First, it proposes a rubric for assessing the quality of early-stage design sketches including line smoothness, proportion, and understandability. Of particular note is the contribution of assessing understandability as a metric for sketches as communication tools. This study also presents a tool to capture designer reflections after each iteration of a prototype. Not only does this record what is learned about a design but also designers’ personal and emotional reactions to the process. Sketching-related results show a positive correlation between sketch quality and understandability, indicating the importance of sketch quality especially when designers use sketches to communicate. Results also indicate that early-stage sketch quantity, but not quality, is linked with design outcomes. This study also finds a link between the frequency of sketching and higher maximum sketch quality scores (i.e., at least one highly rated sketch) as well as a correlation between individuals’ maximum sketch quality scores and overall design outcomes. Preliminary results around prototyping indicate that reflection on both the technical and emotional aspects of prototyping may be a worthwhile area of further study. Finally, several results point to novice designers’ lack of consistent focus on users in their prototyping reflections and presentations.

AbstractGenerative design tools empowered by recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) offer the opportunity for human designers and design tools to collaborate in new, more advanced modes throughout various stages of the product design process to facilitate the creation of higher performing and more complex products. This paper explores how the use of these generative design tools may impact the design process, designer behavior, and overall outcomes. Six in-depth interviews were conducted with practicing and student designers from different disciplines who use commercial generative design tools, detailing the design processes they followed. From a grounded theory-based analysis of the interviews, a provisional process diagram for generative design and its uses in the early-stage design process is proposed. The early stages of defining tool inputs bring about a constraint-driven process in which designers focus on the abstraction of the design problem. Designers will iterate through the inputs to improve both quantitative and qualitative metrics. The learning through iteration allows designers to gain a thorough understanding of the design problem and solution space. This can bring about creative applications of generative design tools in early-stage design to provide guidance for traditionally designed products.

AbstractDevelopments in artificial intelligence (AI) are opening the possibilities for the development of more advanced design tools. An example of these innovations are generative design tools, in which the generation of complex and high performing products is possible. This study investigates the use of generative design tools and how they may influence the design process and designer behaviour. Six interviews of interdisciplinary designers were conducted to understand the implications of using generative design tools. It was observed that generative design tools primarily allow for quantitative inputs to the tool while qualitative metrics, such as aesthetics, are considered indirectly by designers. The subjectivity of the designer and how they incorporate the quantitative and qualitative metrics in the generative design tool can lead to differing outcomes between designers. Notable differences in tool usage are also observed between expert and novice computational designers. Additional studies should be conducted to further understand the extent generative design tools impact the design process, designer behaviour, and design outcomes.

Abstract Spanning knowledge group boundaries is both a source of and barrier to design performance and innovation. Objects—from prototypes to kanban boards—are frequently used in cross-functional design practice, but their associated outcomes appear varied and dependent not only on the objects themselves but on how, when, and by whom they are used. We conducted a two-year ethnography within a turbomachinery design company to understand how professional engineering designers span knowledge group boundaries to advance their designs and design processes. Our findings identify three roles of objects of collaboration: routinizing cross-boundary interaction, translating information across boundaries, and motivating joint negotiation or discovery. We illustrate two prominent outcomes—the co-discovery of a design risk, opportunity, or bottleneck and the co-design of a joint integrated solution—and describe two object role sequences from which these outcomes seem to follow. These findings are significant because they suggest ways for designers to effectively use objects to span knowledge group boundaries.