Professional perspectives on collaborative design work

The early stages of product development are arguably the most important in the design of successful products. This paper describes different approaches to the conceptual design phase of product development, how they are taught to undergraduate engineering students, and how they are practiced in industry both in Germany and in the United States. The authors note that teaching the early stages of product development to future engineers at German Universities is more focused on methodology and processes. In the United States teaching design is more about being creative and overcoming individual constraints in order to find good and unconventional concepts. To understand how the conceptual phase is implemented in industry, the authors interviewed 16 companies in Germany and the United States. A thematic analysis was performed on the responses. In German industry, the authors observe uncertainty about how to apply process management in the very early stage of product development where different concepts are developed and evaluated. In U.S. industry most companies do not claim to follow a process during the early stage of concept development. Observing the differences between what is taught to engineering students in school and what is practiced in industry some conclusions recommendations are drawn. The observations demonstrate a weakness in process reliability during the early stage of product development both, in German and U.S. industry that should motivate academia to adapt its pedagogy in order to enable future engineers to create successful concepts.

This contribution highlights the significance of support methods for the early stages of sustainable product development and culminates in the introduction of a comprehensive framework in this domain. The framework aims at assisting designers and product engineers in generating and evaluating ideas for the development of product systems with high sustainability potential. The multi-iterative framework, whose effectiveness has already been demonstrated in diverse workshops, leverages a fusion of creativity and evaluation techniques, identified through an extensive comparison of techniques.

Communication design students working in new media or digital media fields require training in the design process to create powerful and professional projects. However, even though collaborative design work is common in media industries, many graduate courses are not structured to allow collaborative work in the classroom. In this paper, I present design charrettes as a pedagogical method that stimulates and supports collaborative student design work. Design charrettes are intense periods of design activity most commonly associated with architectural and environmental studies. I have adapted design charrettes in order to achieve particular learning outcomes in multimedia design courses. This paper is a theoretical reflection on using charrettes to teach the design process. The pedagogy behind my use of charrettes is informed by socio-cognitive learning theories. In my multimedia design courses, graduate students participate in charrette activities to experience the design process, to collaborate in project-based design activities, to seek a range of solutions to design problems, and to gain mastery of design research techniques.

Characteristics of food products are commonly assessed in series of sensory studies to gain insight which can be used, for instance, for product development. Sensory studies are very time‐consuming and susceptible to large sources of variation. Assessing information about (new) products by means of instrumental measurements would be very beneficial for numerous reasons, including repeatability, reproducibility and, most of all, the fact that instruments do not suffer from fatigue or adaptation. Measurements simulating sensory assessment of product properties can be performed at different stages of consumption and on different types of sensory attributes. In this study the relation between rheological parameters and creamy mouthfeel was investigated. The goal was to discover whether a model using a limited mechanical characterization, namely parameters describing bulk rheological behaviour, would suffice to describe the sensory attribute ‘creamy mouthfeel’, also called creaminess. The two main reasons for performing this study were (i) to investigate the possibility of using rheological measurements for high‐throughput screening of newly developed custard products without the need for involving sensory panels already at an early stage of product development and (ii) to gain knowledge about the correlation between rheological measurements and the multidimensional attribute creamy mouthfeel. The resulting model shows that prediction of creamy mouthfeel by means of rheological measurements is possible only to a certain extent ($Q_{\rm CV}^2=0.48$). Reasons that can be mentioned for deviations between measured creaminess and modelled creaminess are (i) variation in measured creamy mouthfeel scores (variation in y‐variable) and (ii) lack of description of surface properties of the food product by the rheological measurements used here. The results show that instrumental measurements are complementary to sensory analysis and can greatly facilitate the task for the practitioner at an early stage of product development, making high‐throughput screening of novel products feasible. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The goal of this study is to identify ways to increase the usability of a mobile dialysis device through semi-structured interviews during the early stage of product development. We analyzed interview data using a mixed method of rank order and open-ended questions. The results from the open-ended questions showed that patients and care partners prefer the device being carried on patients’ backs, followed by the waist and the shoulder. We also identified 13 key categories of ideal features that the mobile dialysis device must hold. The results from the rank order question showed that the participants significantly preferred the Vest over the Backpack, Shoulder bag, and Distributed model. Accuracy of the device is more important compared to Safety, Ease of attachment, Comfort, Size, Operational simplicity, and Invisibility. The prioritized needs from patients and care partners provide designers and clinicians with better target solutions for designing a mobile dialysis device.

Photogrammetry-based 3D scanning for supporting design activities and testing in early stage product development

In this article, customer involvement model is used to establish an efficient support system in product concept development (PCD). The method, integrated with meansend chain (MEC), Kansei analytical aided design (KAAD) and simple multi-attribute rating technique exploiting ranks (SMARTER) techniques, proposed here is illustrated via the case study on the creative design of cell phones. From the case study, the prototype customer involvement in collaborative design (CICD)-enabled product conceptualization approach has demonstrated its effectiveness in the early stage of product development.

Human factors considerations in designing a personalized mobile dialysis device: An interview study

Selecting the most suited manufacturing process for a specific product, as well as optimizing the design regarding manufacture and assembly, is actions that will directly impact on cost and quality, aiming at finding the best match between the product’s functional requirements and the attributes of the processes, and it should be carried out in the first stages of product development. In this context, the literature presents some sheet metal joining process selection methods, which can be classified as: mechanical (forming), metallurgical (welding) and chemical (adhesive) processes. However, such methods are complex and not specific for thin sheet metal. Therefore, our goal is to propose a joining process selector for overlapping sheet metal, which can correlate the product’s functional requirements with the technical characteristics of the processes (clinching, rivets and welding) in early stages of product development. Unlike what is found in the literature, this selector is subdivided into five different types of clinching processes. The selector design was based on the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) principle, which easily converts a product’s functional requirements into an ordered joining process list. The joining process data collection was carried out from two approaches: quantitative (joining sheet thickness, joint dimensions, production batch and joining strength) and qualitative (type of material, surface finish and accessibility to perform the joining). Three products were chosen to validate the selector. The results were compared against the literature and commonly commercially employed processes. The application of the selector in commercial products showed compatibility with the literature as well as the commercially used processes. However, depending on the product, other requirements might be considered, such as availability of equipment and production costs.

Product development has become a focus of competition in many industries. Due to decreasing product life cycle, it is important to reduce the time and cost of product development. The product development process includes six main phases: product planning, concept development, system-level design, detailed design, testing and refinement, and production ramp-up [34]. Concept development process consists of four stages: identifying customer needs, establishing product specifications, and generating and selecting product concepts. Recent efforts have been made to improve the product development decisions [20], especially at the early stages of product development, since it has been recognized that nearly 75% of product life-cycle cost is committed by the end of concept development [26]. However, it is difficult to make product design decisions at the early development stages, because decision makers have to consider all life cycle issues [21, 22] with vague project information available.

One of the main challenges of semiconductor packaging is package size reduction. The challenges that this drive introduces are experienced across all stages of product evolution. Starting from chip design, where the same architecture or added functionality needs to be fitted in an even smaller area this challenge is carried over to assembly processes where the need for higher precision and tighter tolerances will be experienced. The end result will be that a device with similar or improved functionality will be occupy less space. This paper will present some methodologies developed and deployed at finite element modeling stage in order to support virtual characterization of reduced package size at early development stages. The target of these methodologies is to provide guidelines for package designers, characterization engineers and modeling engineers at an early stage of product development, in order to support and address the challenges related to package miniaturization. Typical challenges at early characterization include the inability to perform accurate measurements such as device deformation. Due to the significantly reduced footprint, measurement equipment traditionally used to measure deformation of semiconductor device may encounter challenges. The deformation of the single device may be so low, that errors within the equipment or measurement limit will be of the same order of the deformation itself. While this may indicate the deformation of the device to be on the trivial scale, the reality is that some devices in particular sensing devices require accuracy at the nanometer scale.

Socioeconomic crisis and humanitarian disasters can cause increased stress for women who experience inter-partner violence (IPV). This study analyzed the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on this important issue, their related health and social services and working conditions from the perspectives of professionals in different sectors. Forty-three semi-structured interviews were carried out with 47 professionals (44 women and 3 men) from 40 different entities (September 2020—April 2021). This content analysis suggests that the pandemic and its associated prevention measures have had a negative impact on women exposed to IPV and their children, which affected their social wellbeing. Professionals described burnout, difficult and slow administrative processes, and problems with coordination and access to information. These negative impacts were mitigated, in part, by the work of professionals, but this suggests that a series of key strategies are needed to improve the response capacity of the service sector to IPV in situations of crisis. These improvements are related to the availability of human and material resources; an efficient coordination network between the professionals from different sectors; existence of informal support networks in the community; protocols/procedures and prior training for better implementation; and greater flexibility and accessibility of basic services that benefit women who experience IPV.

Logistics costs come from physical and information systems in use. Logistics systems can be complex, very costly and wide reaching in function and geographic parameters. Because of this it is vitally important that marketing staff include one or more logistic specialists at the early stages of product development. By so doing the marketer is able to consider logistics elements and their costs and put these into the marketing plan. The use of a logistics life‐cycle approach can act as a prompt, the aim being to make sure that the logistics factors which might otherwise be overlooked are included. It is used as a tool to obtain an operations and systems input to the product life cycle at the development stages. An outline is proposed for the complete management of the product including an “end game plan”. Also raised is consideration of the individual parts of each product component in the distribution channel, in use by the consumer and after it has been used by the consumer.

Digital health interventions have enormous potential to support patients and the public in achieving their health goals. Nonetheless, many digital health interventions are failing to effectively engage patients and the public. One solution that has been proposed is to directly involve patients and the public in the design process of these digital health interventions. Although there is consensus that involving patients and the public in collaborative design is valuable, design teams have little guidance on how to maximize the value of their collaborative design work. The main objective of this study was to understand how the value of patient and public involvement in digital health design can be maximized, from the perspective of design leaders and patient-public partners. Using a qualitative descriptive methodology, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 design leaders and 9 patient-public partners. Interviewees agreed that involving patients and the public was valuable, however, they questioned if current collaborative methods were optimized to ensure maximal value. Interviewees suggested that patient and public collaborative design can add value through four different mechanisms: (1) by allowing the design process to be an empowering intervention itself, (2) by ensuring that the digital health intervention will be effectively engaging for users, (3) by ensuring that the digital health intervention will be seamlessly implemented in practice, and (4) by allowing patient-public collaborations extend beyond the initial product design. Overall, interviewees emphasized that although collaborative design has historically focused on improving the digital health product itself, patients and the public have crucial insights on implementation planning as well as how collaborative design can be used as its own empowering intervention. The results of this paper provide clarity about the ways that patient and public collaborative design can be made more valuable. Digital health design teams can use these results to be more intentional about their collaborative design approaches.

Success in the market place is very much dependent on the ability to translate satisfaction into product properties and to do it as early as possible in the product development process. This paper addresses this translation process and problems of linking customer satisfaction to the early stages of product development. In the paper Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and a framework for linking internal quality and customer satisfaction are used as a theoretical basis for a case study from Volvo Car Corporation. The case study illustrates how QFD is used as a tool in the translation process and how Volvo by linking satisfaction to design in the improvement of the transmission system of the Volvo 850 achieved outstanding results.