- Project Management, Industrial Engineering, Design thinking, Project Risk Management, Design Methodology, Process Improvement, and 21 moreLean Product Development, Empirical Study, Design Structure Matrix (DSM), Process Models, Design Problem Solving, Risk Management, Design Science, Research Methodology, Qualitative Research, Environmental Sustainability, Engineering, Design, Mechanical Engineering, Technology, Sustainable Development, Design process, Conceptual Design, Design Management, Product Development, AI in Design, and Prototypingedit
- Kilian Gericke is interested in product development. His research is focused on design methods, modeling approaches a... moreKilian Gericke is interested in product development. His research is focused on design methods, modeling approaches and design processes. // product innovation, systems engineering, function modeling, product architecture, design process improvement, design methodology, human centered designedit
Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice.... more
Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice. This article takes the position that the transfer of design methods alone is not an appropriate indicator for assessing the impact of design research by discussing alternative pathways for impacting design practice. Impact is created by different meansfirst of all through the students that are trained based on the research results including design methods and tools and by the systematic way of thinking they acquired that comes along with being involved with research in this area. Despite having a considerable impact on practice, this article takes the position that the transfer of methods can be improved by moving from cultivating method menageries to facilitating the evolution of method ecosystems. It explains what is understood by a method ecosystem and discusses implications for developing future design methods and for improving existing methods. This paper takes the position that efforts on improving and maturing existing design methods should be raised to satisfy the needs of designers and to truly support them.
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Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a... more
Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method's tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method's intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.
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This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design... more
This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design practice and industry. This prevents design practitioners from accessing the rich body of research and knowledge posed by academia. Various web platforms and textbooks allow users to discover or search for design methods, but little support is provided to assess whether or not a method is appropriate for the context or the task at hand. In this exploratory study, interviews were conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Interview responses were coded and analyzed in an effort to understand the patterns in searching, selecting, assessing, and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice. This analysis showed that interviewees would like to search for design methods based on their desired outcomes. Additionally, interviewees considered their personal contacts to be the most valuable source of new methods. These insights show that web-based communities of practice may be a potential link between academia and industry, but existing web repositories and communities require further development in order to better meet the needs of the design practitioner community.
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Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and managing the processes by which they are developed. In practice, companies maintain networks of many interrelated models which need to be... more
Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and managing the processes by which they are developed. In practice, companies maintain networks of many interrelated models which need to be synthesised in the minds of their users when considering issues that cut across them. This article considers how information from product and design process models can be integrated with a view to help manage these complex interrelationships. A framework highlighting key issues surrounding model integration is introduced and terminology for describing these issues is developed. To illustrate the framework and terminology, selected modelling approaches that integrate product and process information are discussed and organised according to their levels and forms of integration. Opportunities for further work to advance integrated modelling in engineering design research and practice are discussed.
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Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches over the last decades. Each of these is meant to support designers in their design endeavors. Industrial practice is excessively diversified... more
Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches over the last decades. Each of these is meant to support designers in their design endeavors. Industrial practice is excessively diversified in terms of contextual requirements, aims, and adopted processes; this automatically begs the question which of the existing models should be selected for application in a specific situation. This paper sets out to contribute to this discourse. It strives to benchmark the fairly novel integrated function modeling (IFM) framework against the well-established function structures modeling approach. The paper comparatively investigates the respective capabilities of the approaches, following the benchmarking protocol used earlier in relation to this Special Issue. Function structures are used as reference as they represent one of the most widespread function modeling approaches in research and practice. Both function structures and the IFM framework are exemplarily applied for modeling a glue gun. The gradual generation and refinement of the models is used to showcase their respective benefits and shortcomings. Eventually, the IFM framework is found to excel over function structures in terms of comprehensiveness and support for different types of function analyses. Finally, future research directions are proposed.
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Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based on the method's name and stage of use. Little support is provided to assess whether a method is appropriate for the task at hand and the... more
Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based on the method's name and stage of use. Little support is provided to assess whether a method is appropriate for the task at hand and the context where the method will be applied. In this explorative study, patterns in searching, selecting, assessing and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice were analyzed across a range of disciplines. This work reports on our findings from interviews conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Several similarities in the way practitioners find, select and assess new methods were found and interesting differences were identified for the practices in exchanging experiences with peers. In this work, we present the findings of our interview study along with directions for future work to better understand design processes in professional practice.
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Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to academia to provide tools and methods to support them. The Modelling and Managing of Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of the Design... more
Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to academia to provide tools and methods to support them. The Modelling and Managing of Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of the Design Society aims to support industry in understanding, modelling and running design processes by bringing together a community of design researchers and interacting with industry by identifying research challenges and working together to resolve them. This paper maps out research challenges for MMEP and reflects over some of the challenges we have as a research community in meeting these ambitious goals. This paper begins by presenting an ambitious research roadmap developed in 2008 and then compares the roadmap with the research topics that current members of the MMEP SIG are working on before reflecting on how and where we have made progress and what would be serious progress in this area. Based on the analyses of research topics and progress, the paper concludes with a discussion of the evolution of research topics and associated challenges for design research, and sketches measures required for improving our efficacy as a research community.
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The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework's usefulness and... more
The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework's usefulness and practical applicability. It allows flexibly adaptive modeling multiple, interrelated views onto the functionality of (interdisciplinary) systems. The findings suggests a large potential for the framework to support cross-disciplinary design and for using the inherent matrices to do function analysis. The paper highlights the views of the practitioners on the strengths and potentials for further improvement.
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This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML with the aim of deriving specific potentials for cross-fertilisation and further improvement regarding their application for function modelling... more
This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML with the aim of deriving specific potentials for cross-fertilisation and further improvement regarding their application for function modelling in interdisciplinary design. The presented comparison comprises literature reviews as well as the practical application of both the IFM framework and SysML for modelling the functionality of an exemplary mechatronic system. The research leads to the identification of advantages and shortcomings in both approaches. Based on these insights, the paper further presents a conceptual adaptation of the IFM framework with the intention to improve its practical applicability and reducing modelling efforts.
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While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models that integrate the two type of models. Those that exist are research systems, which even if validated in industry do not have a broad uptake to... more
While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models that integrate the two type of models. Those that exist are research systems, which even if validated in industry do not have a broad uptake to date. This paper develops an integrated framework for product and process models based on the purpose the models are put it building on a model of Browning and Ramasesh. Selected integrated model are classified according to the framework. This revealed the no model to date gives equal weight to product and process models.
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Lean product development has been developed and deployed in an effort to enhance company operations. Understanding value is the first step to becoming 'Lean'. However, the mere translation of value from its conventional interpretation in... more
Lean product development has been developed and deployed in an effort to enhance company operations. Understanding value is the first step to becoming 'Lean'. However, the mere translation of value from its conventional interpretation in lean production as``something the customer will pay for`` does not equate to an effective value orientation in product development (PD). In order to better understand the theoretical context of PD value in research, as well as the potential application of a value orientation in practice, further study is necessary. This paper aims to broaden the understanding of PD value by discussing by linking roles in value creation and delivery to different contexts and phases of the product life cycle.
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This paper categorises and describes the design stages, stakeholders and decision processes of an overcapacity boiler upgrade that came about from the excessive use of design margins. Using a hospital case study, the reason behind the... more
This paper categorises and describes the design stages, stakeholders and decision processes of an overcapacity boiler upgrade that came about from the excessive use of design margins. Using a hospital case study, the reason behind the overcapacity and excessive margins is explored using semi-structured interviews, document analysis and process modelling. Design margins arise from a lack of systemic thinking during the design and installation phases. It is likely that margins are added as a matter of habit with no real thought to their applicability, calling into question the design process
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This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design... more
This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design practice and industry. This prevents design practitioners from accessing the rich body of research and knowledge posed by academia. Various web platforms and textbooks allow users to discover or search for design methods, but little support is provided to assess whether or not a method is appropriate for the context or the task at hand. In this exploratory study, interviews were conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Interview responses were coded and analyzed in an effort to understand the patterns in searching, selecting, assessing, and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice. This analysis showed that interviewees would like to search for design methods based on their desired outcomes. Additionally, interviewees considered their personal contacts to be the most valuable source of new methods. These insights show that web-based communities of practice may be a potential link between academia and industry, but existing web repositories and communities require further development in order to better meet the needs of the design practitioner community.
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During engineering design, different representations are used to convey information about a systems' components, functionality, spatial layout, and interdependencies. These varying representations may have an impact on the... more
During engineering design, different representations are used to convey information about a systems' components, functionality, spatial layout, and interdependencies. These varying representations may have an impact on the interpretation of a system and consequently the decision-making process. This paper presents a research study that tries to capture these different interpretations by investigating how designers divide a system into subsystem clusters. These subsystem clusters can be considered partitions of a set-in combinatorial mathematics. Given designers' subsystem clusters for three products across three representation modalities, three different analysis methods for finding the most likely partition from observed data are presented. Analysis shows that the Variation of Information analysis method gives the most coherent and consistent results for the search of a most likely cluster. In addition, differences in clustering behaviour are observed based on representatio...
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The transmission of information between requirements modelling and function modelling in the product development process often appears challenging because of multiple used models and different terminology of specific disciplines. The... more
The transmission of information between requirements modelling and function modelling in the product development process often appears challenging because of multiple used models and different terminology of specific disciplines. The integrated function modelling (IFM) framework is used for functional analysis of technical moderate complex systems and supports cross-disciplinary modelling and communication in the design team. To improve the applicability of this method and its supporting purpose in the modelling process, the authors combined requirements as an additional entity with the existing entities of this method. Furthermore, the extended framework has been used to visualise the procedure with this approach as an example. The outlook provides the potential for further development of the method.
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In seeking to retrofit decade old production systems, there is often the need to re-analyse many facets of the system as previous assessments and past assumptions must be validated or amended. The following paper presents the system... more
In seeking to retrofit decade old production systems, there is often the need to re-analyse many facets of the system as previous assessments and past assumptions must be validated or amended. The following paper presents the system modelling and analysis of an industrial cigarette filter maker. The matrix based Integrated Function Modelling (IFM) Framework was applied to model six design entities to create a comprehensive system understanding. The derived system model was subsequently analysed using the Function Integrity Diagnosis and Documentation (FIDD) method to identify risk to system function. Through the unique use-case discussed in this paper, new insights for improvement of the modelling approach and analysis method are identified. This paper concludes with actionable recommendations for improved application of the IFM Framework and FIDD method.
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The aim of this paper is to explore how meanings in products and services can be captured, deconstructed, and finally structured, in order to facilitate the deliberate and intentional creation and conveyance of meanings to users and... more
The aim of this paper is to explore how meanings in products and services can be captured, deconstructed, and finally structured, in order to facilitate the deliberate and intentional creation and conveyance of meanings to users and non-users. These analytical steps for mapping meanings are investigated in an empirical study using a qualitative approach and theoretically grounded in Peirce's triadic model of signs. This new methodology in design research seems promising to obtain a new perspective on meaning in products and services. Through the course of the empirical study, we developed a research method, which is also a design method, called MeaningMap, for organising and structuring meanings. A first exploratory evaluation of the method with students showed its comprehensibility and applicability for analysing and structuring meanings within a limited amount of time. We envision that the MeaningMap as a method for design as communication can support designers during task cla...
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Lightweight design (LWD) is partly reaching its limits. New technologies must not only be used to make products more functional, but also to make LWD more efficient. Here additive manufacturing (AM) should be named. Potentials of the use... more
Lightweight design (LWD) is partly reaching its limits. New technologies must not only be used to make products more functional, but also to make LWD more efficient. Here additive manufacturing (AM) should be named. Potentials of the use in LWD are not yet clear. In this work, existing LWD strategies and their location in the design process are presented. Criteria are worked out which influence the design process and the use of LWD strategies. The use of AM in (hybrid) LWD will be investigated in order to overcome design trade-offs and what influence its use could have on the design process.
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The aim of the paper is to foster a discussion in the engineering design community about its understanding of the innovation phenomena and the unique contribution that comes from engineering design. The paper reports on the dialouge... more
The aim of the paper is to foster a discussion in the engineering design community about its understanding of the innovation phenomena and the unique contribution that comes from engineering design. The paper reports on the dialouge originating from a series of workshops with participants from different backgrounds in engineering design, systems engineering, industrial design psychology and business.Definitions of innovation are revisited as used in business, management and engineering design contexts. The role of innovation is then discussed related to product development from (i) the management perspective, (ii) a systems architecture perspective and (iii) in relation to sustainable development as one driver of innovation.It is argued that engineering design has a central role in how to realise the novelty aspect of innovation and often plays a critical role in maturing these into the valuable products, and there is a need to articulate the role of engineering design in innovation...
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The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework’s usefulness and... more
The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework’s usefulness and practical applicability. It allows flexibly adaptive modeling multiple, inter-related views onto the functionality of (interdisciplinary) systems. The findings suggests a large potential for the framework to support cross-disciplinary design and for using the inherent matrices to do function analysis. The paper highlights the views of the practitioners on the strengths and potentials for further improvement.
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Estimation is a relevant method for problem solving in product development due to the deficiencies in information and short resources. Nevertheless, estimation is hardly mentioned in related literature nor is it part of engineering... more
Estimation is a relevant method for problem solving in product development due to the deficiencies in information and short resources. Nevertheless, estimation is hardly mentioned in related literature nor is it part of engineering education. As a consequence good performance in estimation and the development of estimation competence is left to chance. We believe that estimation can be supported and developed purposive. The aims of our research are to understand estimation in engineering design, and to develop support for engineering practice and education. This paper focuses on demonstrating the relevance of the topic by addressing the following questions: Why is estimation important for engineering design? What is the state of the art in understanding of estimation in general? What is the state of the art of estimation as a method in engineering design? We propose our research framework on the basis of this initial investigation and formulate the main research questions, as well a...
ABSTRACT The focus of our research is to support designers in fostering a more sustainable behaviour of consumers by creating meaning in products and services. The paper describes the results of a literature study into the process of... more
ABSTRACT The focus of our research is to support designers in fostering a more sustainable behaviour of consumers by creating meaning in products and services. The paper describes the results of a literature study into the process of meaning making and the mechanisms through which meaning affects consumer behaviour. Meaning is defined as a mental representation of possible relationships. An initial model, the Meaning-Behaviour Model, is presented, integrating the mechanisms found in literature. Five possible interventions, derived from the model, show how designers can use meaning as a lever to foster enduring behavioural change. The paper contributes to the discussion of introducing meaning through design by exploring the link between meaning and behaviour.