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Designing new products according to user needs and requirements is a key success factor for companies. However, the characterization of user requirements in the early design stages is not an easy task due to the subjective nature of these requirements and because of the communication gap between users and designers. Digital design tools have the potential to enable users to actively participate in the design process and to directly interact with representations of the future product. Yet, they suffer a trade-off between their ability to accurately represent the user experience with the future product and their capacity to offer simple interfaces for the end user to manipulate. To overcome this issue, we introduce a new modular digital tool that allows users to become active participants of the design process through a high level of both immersion and control. The tool consists in a combination of a virtual reality environment for immersion and intuitive physical interfaces for direct control, resulting in a mixed reality hardware/software system. The hardware is made of modular tangible user interfaces (TUIs), custom-made by 3D printing and powered by a 3D game engine while the interactive content is displayed in virtual reality. The modularity of the system allows several TUIs and 3D content behaviours configurations to bring user friendliness and intuitively for each specific design project.

A new electrochemical machining (ECM) process named rotate-print ECM (RPECM) is proposed to meet the requirement of machining revolving parts with complex convexity structures. During the RPECM process, a revolving cathode tool was employed to replace a set of complicated block tools used in conventional sinking ECM process. In this paper, the design method of the revolving cathode tool based on the analysis of an equivalent model for the RPECM process was emphasized. The radius and window edge contour of the cathode tool were designed by optimizing the motion trails of the window edge points and their deviations from the required sidewall profile of the target convexity. A cylindrical test piece was machined experimentally to verify the designed tool. The results showed that the machined cylinder surface is smooth without any flow tracks and residual ribs. A convexity with complex top face contour was fabricated successfully. It can be seen that the sidewall profile is tapered and the edge is nearly trenchant. The processing error of the sidewall profile can be effectively controlled by optimizing the radius and window size of the cathode tool.

To support the introduction of magic in product interaction design, magic effects together with technical clues is shown to be effective inspirations for ‘creative and practical’ products in novice designers. In this paper, we aim to develop a guideline to use the magic-based inspiration cards effectively for novice designers. To do this, six professional designers with three levels of design experiences were invited: junior (2 years), intermediate (7 years), and senior (more than 12 years). The verbal protocol analysis revealed that when providfed with the cards, the designers produced more ideas and concerned more about expected behavior of products. On the other hand, design experience negatively impact fluidity of ideas. Our findings suggested that design process is correlated with fluidity and elaboration, but not originality and feasibility. Finally, a guideline on how to use the magic-based tool effectively is developed based on the approaches carried by professional designers.

While it is well recognized in the literature that modularity is a very important enabler for reconfigurability in manufacturing systems, there is very limited practical guidance on how the various required functions of a production system should be grouped into modules. In this work, a new heuristic approach is developed and presented, to aid the system developer in the identification and synthesis of potential modules during the early design stage of a reconfigurable manufacturing system. The work involves the identification of key module drivers for such systems, and of key criteria that can be used to facilitate the optimization of the granularity and effectiveness of the system. The results are presented in the form of a semi-algorithmic design tool that can be easily understood and used by the developer. The tool is applied to three very different industrial case studies, and is shown to be applicable to various manufacturing scenarios and sub-sectors. The use of the new tool is compared to the use of a design structure matrix approach to function clustering for module synthesis, and is shown to be easier and more objective in its application.

While mixed prototyping has proved to be effective for the assessment of prototypes, this research aims to explore the use of mixed prototyping for the generation of early prototypes. To satisfy end-user’s needs, new products need to be designed with an early integration of end-user requirements. An efficient way to achieve this is to directly integrate the end-users in the design process and give them an intelligible and interactive tool to perform specific design tasks. Current interactive tools to integrate end-users in the design process provide either a high level of immersion (e.g. CAVE) or a high level of control over the virtual prototype (e.g. configurators). We designed a new mixed reality design tool which simultaneously allows end-users to be immersed in a virtual environment (immersion) and to interact with a virtual prototype and to modify it (control), resulting in effective end user-interactions. In two design use-case scenarios, we assessed the end-user experience and satisfaction while using the tool and we also evaluated the impact of the tool on the creative process and the design outcomes. The findings show that, when users are provided with a tool that allows to directly perform design tasks and modify a virtual prototype, as compared to when they have no control, they are more engaged in the design tasks, more satisfied with the design process and they produce more creative outcomes.

There is a growing concern for design students to gain basic technological knowledge for design in real practice. While there is abundance of tools for creativity, technical information has never been implemented as inspiration for ideas. In this paper, to answer the demand of creativity tools with real practice, we created magic-based inspirational cards that contain technical clues of how each magic effect can be created in products. Two versions of the tools were compared: Magic cards (only illustration of magic effects) and Technical cards (illustration of magic effects with additional technical clues). The tools were evaluated with thirty novice designers in two design sessions. In the first session, they were asked to generate design ideas in a design task. Then a week later, they were divided into three groups, control group, Magic cards, and Technical cards. The experimental groups were asked to use the cards as a source of inspiration and to generate design ideas in the same design task. The ideas generated by the participants were assessed in terms of creativity and intended user experience (UX). The findings show that the use of both types of magic-based cards resulted in significantly higher scores in originality and flexibility of ideation. Also, the use of Technical cards led to significantly higher intended UX scores. The analysis of products’ behaviors (outputs) showed a significant increase of physical outputs when magic-based inspiration is provided. Our study suggested that, for novice design students, the Magic Effects set together with technological clues could enhance creativity in ideation.

The shape of a wind turbine blade plays a critical role in the efficiency and robustness of energy production. In particular, the Wavy Leading Edge is a morphology that can be implemented in the blades to improve the operating range in unsteady conditions. The best performance is achieved by fine-tuning the blade geometry to the specific context. An aerodynamic exploration of these kinds of morphologies implies generating and evaluating design iterations. Accordingly, this work presents the development of the generative tool Albatros Create ® . Through interactive visualization, infographics, and centralized parameterization, its goal is to support the geometrical definition of the aerodynamic surfaces of horizontal-axis turbines with or without a wavy leading edge. New airfoil profiles can be created, and 3D models of the rotors designed can be automatically generated. The software was implemented in the design of two rotors which were then recreated in a benchmarking analysis with four other softwares. None of the four managed to generate the smooth surfaces in fully-editable models that were achieved with Albatros Create. This work aims at empowering the research community with a user-friendly tool for exploring rotor designs through virtual prototypes. This can help to integrate further the design, modeling, and optimization stages, addressing a wider audience and facilitating the implementation of Wavy Leading Edge morphologies.

Synthesis from existing examples is a promising way to generate new patterns. However, pattern synthesis is challenging because it is difficult to understand and generate complex structures in patterns. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the layout tree descriptor (LTD) to understand and synthesize patterns from existing ones. The LTD is a binary tree that parametrically describes all primitives, layouts, their dependencies and hierarchies in a pattern. The LTD can be constructed automatically with proposed instance grouping, layout recognition, hyper-primitive matching and tree merging algorithms to realize pattern understanding. To meet specialists’ requirements for detailed modification and recombination of patterns, we designed LTD operations including add, remove, replace and grafting operations to allow users to get new patterns by simply adjusting the LTDs. For stylized synthesis, we gave the computing method of LTD similarity. Therefore, the styles of results and input can be compared and users can control generated serialized results by setting the input pattern weights. To meet user’s implicit preferences and provide novelty in creative design, we propose an evolutionary approach to creative synthesis. The system generates new patterns continuously based on LTD grafting, meanwhile user selection of preferred patterns will guide the direction of evolution. Experiments using the developed prototype system show that our approach can synthesize novel and complex patterns effectively, meeting different requirements in practice and providing plenty of digital textures for products.

Learning Design (LD) research accounts for several design support tools, or LD tools, employing representations for learning designs to facilitate the “teachers as designers” thinking while preparing learning experiences. In contrast to existing studies having followed mainly a specialist/researcher (as opposed to a teacher) perspective, our quest to develop an LD tool follows a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach involving practitioners. Specifically, in this paper, we attempt to give voice to teachers as designers and investigate how they prefer having their learning designs represented by LD tools. Aiming to create a principled account of how to represent learning designs in an LD tool, we first conducted an integrative literature review to formulate a representational framework that drove our research. Subsequently, we addressed the following LD representational dimensions: (i) format, (ii) organisation, (iii) guidance and support, and (iv) contextualisation. We are reporting on a case study conducted with 16 participants in a teacher education context. Although previous research typically reported findings based on a single LD tool’s evaluation over a short period, we have opted for eliciting feedback based on a rich LD experience. To this end, we acquainted participants in LD projects with two LD tools (Learning Designer and WebCollage) during an academic semester. Furthermore, we followed a mixed-method explanatory sequential design applied through a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to achieve a more profound consideration of the teachers’ preferences for LD representations. Our findings indicate that the teachers strongly endorse an LD tool supporting a visual format and a global organisation in the form of a table that provides a global overview of a learning design while focusing on its specific elements. Teachers seem to prefer an LD tool that balances providing guidance and flexibility, as they opt for (i) a non-restrictive taxonomy for articulating learning objectives, (ii) some form of standardisation for formatting learning units, along with allowing free formation, (iii) a flexible pedagogical framework for modelling the learning activities’ pedagogy so that it can be adjusted to particular designers’ needs, and (iv) a typology of technologies that can be utilised or not. In addition, they seemed to favour an LD tool supporting high contextualisation, as they prefer to describe contextual details for a learning design’s units and activities. These findings constitute design principles for our ongoing DBR and may stimulate momentum for researchers developing LD tools.

The rise and advancement of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has significantly improved patient outcomes, yet its technical challenges—such as tissue manipulation and tissue retraction—are not yet overcome. Robotic surgery offers some compensation for the ergonomic challenges, as retraction typically requires an extra robotic arm, which makes the complete system more costly. Our research aimed to explore the potential of rapidly deployable structures for soft tissue actuation and retraction, developing clinical and technical requirements and putting forward a critically evaluated concept design. With systematic measurements, we aimed to assess the load capacities and force tolerance of different magnetic constructions. Experimental and simulation work was conducted on the magnetic coupling technology to investigate the conditions where the clinically required lifting force of 11.25 N could be achieved for liver retraction. Various structure designs were investigated and tested with N52 neodymium magnets to create stable mechanisms for tissue retraction. The simplified design of a new MIS laparoscopic instrument was developed, including a deployable structure connecting the three internal rod magnets with joints and linkages that could act as an actuator for liver retraction. The deployable structure was designed to anchor strings or bands that could facilitate the lifting or sideways folding of the liver creating sufficient workspace for the target upper abdominal procedures. The critical analysis of the project concluded a notable potential of the developed solution for achieving improved liver retraction with minimal tissue damage and minimal distraction of the surgeon from the main focus of the operation, which could be beneficial, in principle, even at robot-assisted procedures.