This paper aims to assist learners in effectively documenting, transforming, and managing natural language-based information during the Design thinking (DT) process. Further, it seeks to aid evaluators in ensuring traceability and capturing design rationale when assessing the process and outcomes of DT. To achieve this, it presents templates that facilitate documentation and assessment. The effectiveness of these templates was evaluated through an empirical study involving 20 undergraduate students in a design thinking workshop. Analysis of documented templates, questionnaires, and interviews reveals the positive effects of templates on documentation and assessment activities and justifies using proposed documentation templates. The templates can be used as a support tool for process-based documentation as well as assessment activities during the early stages of the DT process.

Design teams commonly need to explain the rationale or logic behind how they frame design challenges and develop a particular design concept and not others. This paper explores the use of Design Logic Visualizations (DLV) as a boundary object to enhance understanding and communication in convergent interdisciplinary engineering design environments. We developed the DLV as a new design tool, building upon existing design process visualizations like design signatures, and provide a case study from our NASA team. We then use a reflection-based autoethnographic and collaborative inquiry approach to reflect on how the DLVs influenced our team, our process, and our decision-making. The findings suggest DLVs can serve as a succinct storytelling tool, support shared understanding across disciplines and levels of leadership, and, ultimately, influence design outcomes.

Medical phantoms are models used for imaging and therapy, enabling research, quality assurance, and training without human test subjects. Their development relies on selecting tissue-mimicking materials, however the lack of a holistic overview to guide this process poses challenges. This work presents a comprehensive design catalogue for phantom materials, offering a structured overview of materials and their imaging properties for computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound, including parameters such as CT numbers, relaxation times, and acoustic properties. It is implemented as a digital tool with filtering options, enhancing usability and decision-making. Despite limitations from incomplete data in the literature, the catalogue establishes a groundwork for a standardized, expandable resource to support future phantom design.

eHealth systems, such as digital care applications or remote monitoring devices, can improve health outcomes using user-centered design principles to create medical devices that adapt to users’ needs and contexts. Data-enabled design (DED) builds on these principles by leveraging user-generated data to iteratively refine systems based on real-world use, enabling adaptive and context-sensitive solutions. However, its exploratory and iterative nature conflicts with the rigid protocols required in clinical trials to evaluate safety and effectiveness. This study revises DED in alignment with clinical trial requirements, identifying four key challenges and proposing a four-phase Clinical Data-Enabled Design (C-DED) framework. This framework reconciles exploratory design with trial methodological demands, supporting the development of safe, effective, and user-centered eHealth medical devices.

Digital engineering transformation in industrial companies requires addressing diverse needs and their impact on every impacted engineering aspect. This paper analyses Changes initiated by transformation drivers and presents a systematic approach to integrate sustainability into engineering processes and artifacts. As a currently important topic the integration of sustainability data in engineering is used as an example of application. Based on identified use cases, sustainability parameters are derived and linked to engineering data objects to pinpoint their placement within the early product development. The results demonstrate how data-driven approaches enable effective sustainability integration and provide a foundation for future digital engineering transformations due to diverse divers.

As society and the field of engineering evolves, it is necessary for engineering tools to evolve as well. Through a co-design approach, this work explores the re-design of Pugh’s Product Design Specifications tool for engineering design courses to increase scaffolding of the tool for student learning and incorporate societal implications drawing upon design justice. This re-design was conducted in collaboration with Elizabethtown College faculty members, instructors and students. This paper details the iterative co-design process, showcasing the evolution of the tool that culminated in the latest iteration of the re-designed PDS tool. We conclude with a reflection on this co-design process and recommendations for evolving other engineering design tools to incorporate social justice concepts.

Research into the foundational theories and management of software design remains limited. A 2010 workshop was convened to explore professional software development practices. The workshop sought to foster collaboration between the software engineering and design communities by examining foundational aspects of software design. Building on that workshop’s objectives, this paper investigates contemporary professional software design practice and its management within organizational contexts. It is informed by findings from three interviews with experienced software design managers. This work addresses an important gap by examining software design management through the lens of design rather than solely from a project management perspective. Additionally, it contributes to the development of a general theory of software design by integrating diverse theoretical frameworks.

The complexity and dynamism of global markets is driving the manufacturing industry to evolve from product-based business models to solution providers by integrating smart services. This shift poses challenges, particularly for the organizational design of technical service organizations that deliver these services. Despite the growing importance of servitization, research on the organizational impact of smart services remains limited. Combining a systematic literature review and case study approach with expert interviews, this study examines how smart services affect organizational design of technical service organizations, in the following dimensions: structure, people, processes, and reward systems. The findings offer initial design approaches for manufacturers transitioning to smart service delivery and advance theoretical and practical insights in this field.

The notion of “zero-sum” games describes situations characterized by scarcity and competition. Reframing these situations to yield more positive sum scenarios benefits from design strategies that can identify new sources of value, oriented toward out-comes that reward collective benefit over maximizing one’s individual strategy to win at others’ expense. This emergent practice, called Positive Sum Design, identifies and critiques the conditions that contribute to zero-sum bias in the interest of creatively reframing challenges and redesigning scenarios to encourage more cooperative strategies and pluralistic values. Positive Sum Design can be thus characterized as both a cultural critique and a set of creative practices applied toward that critique to help practitioners identify opportunities for transcending presumed constraints and transmuting zero sum games into non-zero-sum ones.

Sensor-integrating, “gentelligent” components allow to “inherit” operational loads-data for design optimisations from one generation to the next. For area-wide acquisition and reliable transmission of this data, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are often used, but small sensor nodes for reconstructing deformations and loads, so-called shape sensing, are rarely considered as well as a methodical development of such sensor nodes. This paper presents the development of a small sensor node in accordance to the VDI 2206 for shape sensing with a prototype with strain gauges, HX711 A/D converters and an Arduino Nano 33 IoT microprocessor. An infrastructured WSN is built and tested on an aluminium part at a test rig. The shape sensing is carried out with three sensor nodes and the deformed shape is displayed on a server-website to demonstrate the functionality of the methodically developed WSN.

People rely on daily interactions with artifacts, greatly influencing their physical, mental, and social well-being. Despite this, current design practices often overlook well-being as a core consideration. Affordance theory, which explains how an artifact’s features enable specific user actions and experiences, offers a promising lens for addressing this gap. This study focuses on assessing affordance mechanisms as a potential tool to support design practices to design for positive well-being outcomes. Using transportation modes as a case study, we interviewed college students to explore how specific mechanisms can contribute to positive or negative well-being outcomes. Findings resulted in 233 examples, which showed trends in mechanisms, modes, and well-being outcomes. Ultimately, this work presents an initial framework for embedding well-being considerations into design.

In the context of volatile markets, characterised by a need for continuous product development involving module-wise product modifications, the importance of flexibility as an attribute of products and their production system has been increasing. This paper presents a methodological approach focusing on the flexibility evaluation of modules regarding their interfaces. The subject encourages engineers and researchers to analyse and rethink the interface design and the location of module boundaries regarding change propagation. The method was validated using the Design Method Validation System (DMVS) to determine its usefulness, applicability and acceptability. The design workshop for validation was applied to a product family of trunk lids by employees of a German car manufacturer.

Requirements engineering is in the design process, translating stakeholder needs into actionable and well-defined specifications. While existing design enablers and tools provide partial solutions, they often fall short in addressing essential aspects such as real-time feedback, lifecycle management, and the use of controlled vocabularies. To bridge these gaps, the Requirements Authoring Design Enabler (RADE), a macro-enabled Excel tool, is presented to support requirement authoring, tracking, and management. RADE integrates features like automated feedback, a dual-mode interface, robust change tracking, and controlled vocabularies. The tool was tested with pre-service engineers with user feedback informing iterative refinements. RADE addresses key challenges in requirements engineering, demonstrating its potential to enhance design outcomes across various domains.

Rapid pace of change and increasing complexity in today’s world demand innovative approaches to product development. Foresight methods enable the anticipation of future scenarios and the derivation of product properties. However, current approaches lack mechanisms to continuously align product development with evolving environment and customer requirements, often resulting in late changes and high costs. Early detection of deviations is needed. This paper presents an approach for continuous monitoring, bridging strategic foresight and the product engineering process (PEP). By analyzing prior work and literature, a process model was developed to identify tipping points where product adaptations are necessary using indications and indicators. Initial evaluation through a case study using coffee machines showed the approach’s usability but improvement potential was also identified.

Structured reflection can initiate learning, increase team performance and support engineering teams in adapting their engineering design activities or methods. Engineering teams with limited reflection experience use reflection often not effectively. Therefore, additional support in the implementation of reflection, guiding and structuring reflection and in providing goal-related reflection guiding questions is needed. To improve the quality of reflection and enable engineering teams to reflect, a chatbot-supported reflection concept to assist engineers is proposed in this contribution. For this purpose, the potential and challenges of existing chatbot approaches are analyzed and classified. Based on the reflection process and tools from preliminary work, use cases and an initial architectural reflection chatbot concept are developed and presented in this paper.

This study explores the use of agile methods to support Additive Manufacturing (AM) in transitioning from R&D to production. Using a consumer goods company division as a case study, the research examines how agile methods facilitate flexibility, collaboration, and innovation despite challenges such as the materiality of products methods inconsistencies. Findings reveal how tailored agile practices designed for Additive Manufacturing enhance technology readiness and identify areas for improvement, including stakeholder engagement and role alignment. Recommendations are proposed to refine an Agile Design Process Model for Additive Manufacturing and improve technology maturation.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) offer high lightweight potential, particularly for dynamic machine components due to their strength-to-weight ratio and low thermal expansion. However, integrating CFRP into stressed interfaces, such as tool spindles, poses challenges like anisotropic properties and tribological complexity. This study presents a multi-level approach to investigate and transfer tribological parameters in CFRP systems. Using the hierarchical product component test pyramid, it bridges product, structure and meterial levels, e.g. through simplified block-on-plate, as well as block-on-tube tests. Through abstracted and application-oriented test setups, key influencing factors can be identified and analyzed. The hierarchical test pyramid allows for stepwise knowledge transfer between abstraction levels, reducing testing effort without sacrificing relevant information.

Secure development is an ever-evolving field that has advanced quickly in recent years with initiatives like Secure Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Development Security Operations (DevSecOps), and Model-Based Security Engineering (MBSE). Despite the persistence of the security and design communities to include security in the design process, significant security breaches continue to occur. Our work reviews existing literature to determine the current state of the research at the intersection of these design and cybersecurity fields and ultimately proposes an integrative and systematic approach for developers to generate design principles that incorporate traceable security. This approach integrates security regulations and design principles and activities, encouraging compliance and security considerations at the earliest stages of the design thinking process.

Prototyping is an important component of the engineering design process and has become a frequently studied topic in engineering education. The iterative strategy of creating prototypes, where a single design is refined with repeated improvements, is widely taught and considered to be the default approach to prototyping. However, research has shown that a parallel approach to prototyping, where multiple concepts are tested simultaneously, has potential benefits when exploring a complex design space. Recent studies on parallel prototyping in first-year engineering classrooms have shown that students required to use a parallel strategy produced higher performing final designs than students who used an iterative strategy. This work places the parallel and iterative prototyping strategies in a typical classroom setting where first-year engineering students have control over their strategy.

Sensor-integrating, gentelligent components “inherit” data on operational loads from one generation to the next for design optimisations and require an optimal sensor placement (OSP) to make accurate decisions based on this data. The OSP can be very time-consuming, and most studies focus only on one load case. To address this issue, a methodology for OSP for several load cases, based on the region-growing algorithm for FEM simulation data (RGA4FEM) for solution space reduction, is presented. For validation of the methodology’s applicability, a case study is carried out for a boom of a satellite antenna. The results show that region-based approaches are slower to converge but need smaller populations to find global optima with a genetic algorithm. Furthermore, high robustness is achieved for the most demanding parameters on all load cases in a single optimisation.