| 1. |
- Andersson, Torbjörn, 1976-
(författare)
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Aesthetic Flexibility : In Industrial Design Practice
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Competition among companies that produce complex or large product portfolios has created a need to use modularity strategies not only to flexibly manage technical complexity in a cost-effective manner but also to produce visually appealing products. This research aims to understand how the visual appearance of products is affected by modular product development strategies and creates coherent product brands. Thus, this study examines the intersection of design aesthetics, product portfolio management, product brand management, and design management. Specifically, this study aims to understand how such strategies constrain and generate possibilities when the industrial design process concerns itself with visual appearance. The main research approach has been qualitative multi-case methodology (Miles et al, 2014; Eisenhardt, 1989) and design theory building (Chakrabarti and Blessing, 2016) that collects data through interviews, experimentation, and theoretical studies based on findings in the literature. Sixteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with design vice presidents, senior designers, and senior design engineers at five Swedish manufacturers from the automotive, MedTech, consumer goods, commercial vehicles, and materials handling industries. This approach has resulted in the description of three theoretical models and a design method, product gist, for investigating prototypicality in a product category. Aesthetic flexibility reflects the requirement that under certain circumstances an industrial designer has to plan for future (as yet unknown) changes in a design. Each of the three theoretical models has a different focus: one model describes three ways manufacturing companies organise a strategic in-house design function; one model describes how design decisions are made on a general level through an intuitive and knowledge-based judgment process; and one model describes the strategies a manager needs to consider when developing an existing product portfolio and how the strategies influence industrial design practice. Understanding visual flexibility serves as a starting point for further investigations of how development strategies affect visual product design. This understanding provides industrial designers insight into how they can develop product systems that share design components across product lines to promote brand identity. The findings of this work illustrate and explain a complex and multi-facetted design phenomenon that many designers manage more or less intuitively today; therefore, this study advances the understanding of the field for academics, teachers, and professional designers.
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| 2. |
- Ruiz Muñoz, Juan Felipe, 1986-
(författare)
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Problems in Problem-Based Design Engineering Education : Towards a Multidisciplinary Designerly Educational Approach
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Modern industry faces complex and 'wicked' problems that require engineering professionals to go beyond traditional natural science-based linear problem-solving approaches and adopt collaborative, multidisciplinary, and iterative problem-solving strategies. To tackle these kinds of problems, organizations are increasingly turning to design problem- solving methods based on the designer’s way of thinking, acting, and doing. Designers have a distinctive ability to deal with poorly defined, ambiguous, or "wicked" problems by emphasizing iterative exploration of both the problem and the solution spaces. They do this through design reasoning patterns that involve constant iteration and temporary solutions. This shift towards designerly ways of problem-solving has, in turn, had an effect on engineering education, where there has been a significant shift towards educational models that utilize design methodologies to engage students in immersive problem-solving experiences. One challenge for educators who utilize models based on designerly thinking is to create structures that actually support the learning objectives, and the development of student skills that are rooted in design reasoning and acting, and not merely in design tools. Another challenge is to support collaboration across multiple areas that traditionally had clear boundaries.This thesis studies practices utilized by educators in problem-based designerly education to understand the underlying mechanisms and theoretical underpinnings of problem exploration in multidisciplinary education. Additionally, this thesis aims to explore and discuss the same processes and methods in the context of multidisciplinary education and design objects that can support collaboration across boundaries.This thesis's key contributions are the exploration and discussion of aspects of problem exploration, framing, and reframing in a designerly problem-based multidisciplinary educational environment, as well as the challenges and difficulties that educators and students encounter in the process of exploring problems and collaborating and crossing disciplinary boundaries with participants from multiple disciplines. To do so, this thesis first explores the importance that (the framing of the) design brief has in the problem-solving process. Furthermore, the design briefs are discussed as boundary objects that serve a crucial role in negotiation, communication, and coordination tools between stakeholders. Second, the importance of the reflective process that follows the idea generation and prototype-building activities are discussed as an aspect of an educational model that allows participants to explore problems and avoid design fixation. Moreover, these objects are discussed based on their function as disciplinary boundary crossing objects and as an aid in negotiation, and collaboration objects in problem exploration. Thirdly, methods and processes for assessment of student characteristics and skills are discussed, where tensions and trade-offs between self-reporting and observer-based methods are studied and explored. These methods then serve as boundary objects in the discussions between teaching teams in the student team formation process. Furthermore, team building and specifically the process of trust-building and objects that aid in boundary-crossing collaboration and communication to develop trust between students are also discussed.
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| 3. |
- Andersson, Torbjörn, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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HOW DESIGNERS STRATEGICALLY MANAGE PRODUCT PORTFOLIOS
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Design Society. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2732-527X.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The continuous management of a manufacturing company's product portfolio is a key aspect ofsuccessful product development. Managers determine when and which products should be updated orterminated. This process influences inhouse Industrial design teams, thus prompting a range ofdevelopment strategies they might deploy. In product portfolio management there is a tension betweenstandardisation and customisation. From a marketing perspective this is may be addressed through brandDNA, from engineering through modularization. The design perspective (merging those two) has beenill-explored, particularly from professional designers. Previously we proposed a theoretical modeldescribing different industrial design projects and how they influence industrial designers strategicthinking. It was developed through literature reviews and examples found in manufacturing industry.Through a multi-case interview study with 16 participants from five manufacturing companies withstrong brands, this article aims to empirically evaluate the proposed model. The results show that therespondents could describe all but one industrial design projects, the cause maybe that they had not beenexposed to saving a company by doing a total makeover.
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| 4. |
- Andersson, Torbjörn, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Product portfolio management in industrial design : a model of design strategies for mature portfolios
- 2021
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Ingår i: International Journal of Product Development. - : Inderscience Publishers. - 1477-9056 .- 1741-8178. ; 25:4, s. 343-368
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To achieve progression in a product portfolio, companies employ industrial designers to aid in the development and creation of new products. Researchers have shown that industrial designers play a consolidating role at both strategic and operational management levels due to the need to incorporate requirements from several company functions, such as brand, research and development, production, economics and senior management. This article investigates how to expand the ways in which a product portfolio may be extended and updated, from an industrial design perspective. Seven product portfolio development strategies were identified. Inspired by studies of competitor's influence on an existing portfolio, a theoretical descriptive model was developed: the Industrial Design Product Portfolio Management model, which positions the suggested product portfolio development strategies in relation to existing and competing products. The findings may advance our current understanding of existing product portfolio management strategies and the connection between management and product design. Thus, it could be a useful framework for academics, teachers and professionals.
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| 5. |
- Chu, Wanjun, 1991-
(författare)
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On the other side of change : Exploring the role that design can play in retaining sustainable doings
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The world keeps changing more rapidly. Induced by context change disruptions such as individual life-course changes and macro socio-economical events, the way people carry out their everyday life doings is also undergoing a dynamic transition process, which may open up windows of opportunity for design to transit people’s behavior in a more sustainable direction.A successful behavior transition entails not only changing people’s wrongdoings but also retaining the existing desired doings. However, over the last decade, the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life seems to have grown accustomed to the concept of change. The potential role that design may play in retaining people’s existing sustainable doings has been ill-addressed. This dissertation aims to develop an activity-based theoretical approach to help design researchers and practitioners better understand how people transit behavior when they undergo context change disruptions, and further explore design implications informed by the sustainable behavior retention perspective.The study comprises two parts. In the first part, six explorative case studies were used to investigate the applicability of adopting activity theory (AT) as a theoretical lens for understanding context change-induced behavior transition phenomena. As a result, an AT-based framework was iterated, developed and validated. In the second part, by incorporating the proposed framework with the theoretical understanding generated from a prescriptive meta-synthesis study, an AT-informed toolkit prototype was developed and evaluated.Three key findings can be identified. First, at a conceptual level, the study reveals that the design for sustainable behavior retention perspective may complement the design for behavior change perspective by facilitating a bottom-up and context-focused relative approach to achieve sustainability. Second, at a design analytical level, three dimensions of AT: i). hierarchical structure, ii). long-term development and iii). reality-based contextual scales of analysis are especially useful for systematically analyzing the impacts of context change disruptions on people’s everyday life doings. Third, at a design synthesis level, the AT-informed design toolkit prototype and the extracted design implications can provide a systemic view that helps designers take both sustainable behavior change and retention perspectives into early-stage design ideation.The contribution of the dissertation is two folds. First, it introduces the perspective of sustainable behavior retention into the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life. Second, it provides an activity-based theoretical framework as a potential lens for designers to better cope with context change disruptions.
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| 6. |
- Ekströmer, Philip, 1991-
(författare)
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A first sketch of Computer Aided Ideation : Exploring CAD tools as externalization media in design ideation
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Even though Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools have changed the way designers work in most parts of the design process, designers still mostly use pen-and-paper sketching when generating design ideas. Previous studies exploring the use of CAD tools for design ideation have concluded that the tools available at the time did not support reflective conversation, serendipitous interpretation and creativity, making them unsuited for design ideation. However, many of these studies used tools now considered obsolete, implying that the conclusions might no longer be valid. With the variety and capabilities of current CAD tools, there is an opportunity for a new exploration of CAD tools in design ideation.The aim of this licentiate thesis was to explore the use of CAD tools as externalization media in design ideation, what effect this has on the ideation process and how CAD tools might support design ideation. To this end, the thesis explored the use of CAD tools in design ideation in four studies. The first study consisted of a literature review on the strengths and weaknesses of sketches and CAD tools and a focus group discussion with three design experts. The second study compared master theses to explore how design representations used in the design process affect the breadth of design space exploration. The third study was a case study with two cases featuring the use of game engines and Virtual Reality for automotive lighting design and the fourth study compared the workflow in VR-sketching and pen-and- paper sketching.The results of the studies in this thesis suggest that the notion that CAD tools are not useful for design ideation is no longer true. Based on expert evaluations and case studies, this thesis concludes that there are several opportunities for the use of CAD tools in design ideation. This is certainly true in design fields where it is difficult to make sketches. The potential strengths of using CAD tools for design ideation includes the ability to design in full scale and the ability to perform instantaneous transform operations, such as scaling and deforming. However, the ability to instantly undo in CAD tools has been identified as both a potential strength and potential a weakness for design ideation. While being able to rapidly undo mistakes could be beneficial to the ideation process, achieving a faster workflow with less time redoing and more time working on creating, this might also result in fewer opportunities for reinterpretation.The conclusions in this thesis provide arguments for the use of CAD tools in design ideation, which could lead to new ways of generating, working with and thinking about design ideas. The findings also act as a stepping stone for further studies in the area of Computer Aided Ideation.
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| 7. |
- Ruiz Muñoz, Juan Felipe
(författare)
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The Problem of Formulating Design Problems : A Typology of Design Briefs
- 2020
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is common for a design team to be handed a problem to solve for others. The handing over is normally referred to as a ‘briefing’ process, and the documentation of the starting point and what is to be done is known as a ‘brief’. It is known that the way we frame and understand a problem influences what paths we see to potential solutions. The aim of this thesis is to understand what makes a good design brief and to do so in order to create an empirically informed, and theoretically underpinned, typology of design briefs and the kind of search processes they are disposed to induce.Different bodies of literature have tried to grasp how design solves problems in order to understand designer’s behavior and ultimately facilitate or improve it. Distinctions can, and have been made, between different kinds of problem formulations, as well as different problem-solving approaches. This thesis aims to integrate two previously distinct literatures, search process from the organizational perspective developed by James G. March, Herbert A. Simon, Richard Cyert and others and Design and the Design Process from the perspectives of authors such as Donald Schön, Kees Dorst and Nigel Cross among others, to propose a typology of design briefs in order to ultimately facilitate problem formulation and subsequently facilitate the design process.The simple and immediate answer to the question of what makes a good design brief is: ‘that depends’. It depends on the design process to be followed (if there is one), it depends on the kind of goals that should be achieved, the time available, and it also depends on how much and what is known about the problem and potential solutions. Based on this, four ideal types of design briefs are articulated, including the expected associated search behavior and challenges of design teams.
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| 8. |
- Bengtsson, Marie, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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This is how we roll; A play on creative thought and the generation of novelty
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings of Meaningful Play 2018. - : ETC press. ; , s. 380-387
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper examines generation of novelty and creative dynamics in design teams that aim at arrivingat something truly novel. Looking at the works by Schumpeter, Campbell and March in explorationsfor solutions that go beyond what could be easily foreseeable and the works of Smith, Lindsey,Cardoso among others, in the field of design fixation, this paper explores an approach taken tointroduce elements of randomness in design exercises to prevent fixation and facilitate aimless andunguided explorations. The dynamic explained in this paper presents the utilization of a game-baseddynamic in design teams that facilitates the generation of novel ideas.
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