Product Design Domain Research Articles

A survey of LLM-augmented knowledge graph construction and application in complex product design

In the field of complex product design, deploying knowledge graphs (KGs) has become a promising trend due to its strength on exploiting and applying the large-scale, complex, and specialized domain knowledge. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have also attracted much attention due to their outstanding performance in natural language understanding and generation. However, in the research of complex product design dominated by domain knowledge, few studies involve LLMS and KG at the same time. To fill this gap, we survey 42 articles published in the last four years, focusing on three key questions. The combination of LLM and KG in specific applications in complex product design is deeply discussed. The analysis reveals how these techniques facilitate data collection, design concept formation and design process optimization and proposes a technical framework combining LLM and KG for complex product design domain. In addition, we identify key challenges and propose directions for future research. As an explorative survey paper, this paper provides insightful ideas for implementing more specialized domain knowledge graph in complex product design field.

AN EXPLORATION OF THE ROLE OF CREATIVITY IN CROWDFUNDING PRODUCT DESIGN PROJECTS

AbstractCrowdfunding is becoming increasingly popular for funding projects, particularly in the domain of product design, by asking a large group of people. Previous studies have indicated that creativity plays a significant role in product design and is considered an important factor of success for new product design and development. However, these studies have not explicitly explored the role of creativity in crowdfunding product design projects. This paper investigates this issue by conducting a case study employing expert evaluations of selected successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding product design project samples. The results of the study show there is a positive relationship between the creativity of a product and the success of its crowdfunding campaign. Therefore, creativity can be considered a success factor of crowdfunding. The study also suggests creative products, especially useful ones, might have more potential to attract people's willingness to fund them. This paper has contributed to the research on design, creativity, product design and development, and funding business models. Most importantly, this paper has raised the significance of creativity in design and business.

Combining PCA-AHP Combination Weighting to Prioritize Design Elements of Intelligent Wearable Masks

Intelligent wearable masks are gaining increasing interest due to COVID-19 and the problems and limitations of existing masks. This paper prioritizes the design elements of personal protective equipment-intelligent wearable masks from the perspective of the product design domain. Using principal component analysis (PCA), the principal components of the design elements were selected first in this paper. Using the combined weights (PCA-AHP) method, the intelligent wearable masks’ prioritized design elements at each level were determined. The highest priority among the primary elements is comfort (0.3422), with the adjustable ear strap (0.1870) receiving the highest priority among the primary elements of comfort. The highest priority in functionality (0.2733) is anti-respiratory droplets/air purification (0.1097), the highest priority in usability (0.1686) is the easy removal and replacement of filters (0.0761), the highest priority in the aesthetic design (0.1192) is styling (0.0509), and the highest priority in material (0.0967) is flexible fabric material (0.0355). Finally, the six prioritized design elements were evaluated using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE), and overall, 76% of the experts considered them “appropriate” or “very appropriate” and 18% considered them “fair.” Therefore, this study’s six most prioritized design elements proposed for intelligent wearable masks can satisfy users’ needs.

Conceptual Modeling in Product Design within Virtual Reality Environments

Digitalization has already permeated most of the design activities, but in spite of this, the generation of visual representations of concepts in the product design domain still relies on analog tools in real-world contexts. Despite immersive 3D technologies, such as Virtual Reality, have become widely available and affordable, most designers still make use of pencils and paper sheets, or their digital counterparts, to sketch their initial ideas on 2D supports. This study aims at investigating the reasons behind the mismatch between the rapid growth of immersive technologies and their scarce adoption in the conceptual design activities. Based on the analysis of the state of the art, a classification of the approaches proposing new ways to conduct conceptual representation of products has been drawn. The geometry representation, i.e. parametric or polygonal, and the interaction methods have been taken as metrics to categorize previous works. Weak connections between the modeling paradigm implemented and the interaction methods, lack of spatial faithfulness, ergonomic concerns and the need for quantitative metrics to compare objectively the data resulting from different testing sessions across the various studies are the main issues identified. In order to get concrete evidence of such thoughts, an experimental session has been devised with users from different backgrounds. They were asked to make conceptual sketches of a computer mouse in a traditional fashion, i.e. with pen and paper, and using two off-the-shelf Virtual Reality applications, based on 3D sketching and 3D sculpting respectively. The results are discussed qualitatively by visually comparing the sketches made by the testers, enriched by information deducted by surveying the users before and after the experiments. By comparing the sketches made by each user with the three procedures, preliminary results indicate that VR systems don't bring dramatic improvements compared to traditional 2D sketching tools. Furthermore, despite being enjoyable, VR systems caused physical fatigue, which is a problem that basically does not affect 2D sketching. Despite the size of the sample cannot provide statistical evidence, the outcomes provided good indications about the technology readiness level of Virtual Reality as a conceptual design tool, paving the way for future research directions.

Towards Creativity Stimulating Design Intervention for Multidisciplinary Innovation Teams

AbstractThe aim of our research is to stimulate cross disciplinary design collaboration to improve innovation processes in product and service design domain. We focus on the intersection of biotechnology and design as this field poses great challenges and opportunities for innovation, and it has received little attention in light of technological advancements of digital goods over the past decades. Experimental studies in the area expose challenging interactions, rising from lack of common vocabulary and preconceptions. Organisational management studies suggest that creativity is a prerequisite for innovation in group processes. As such, we are interested in enhancing collective creativity. Numerous studies investigate external creativity triggers, however only on individual level. Our review suggests that external triggers can be effective when the task is problem solving or styling, but ambiguous goals like innovation require stimulation of intrinsic triggers, such as group incidental learning and tacit knowledge. To explain this, we propose a hypothetical innovation approach, that draws attention to cognitive stimulation methods leading to creativity in multidisciplinary teams.

An integrated Shannon entropy and TOPSIS for product design concept evaluation based on bijective soft set

This work addresses the problem of concept evaluation in uncertain environments of early design stages, with the help of the proposed integrated method involving bijective soft sets, Shannon entropy and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The application of soft set theory in the domain of product design and development is still not being efficiently utilised by previous works. Therefore, the benefit of soft set theory to define the attributes of an object through any type of approximations is used to deal with qualitative description of design criteria, by designers, and the linguistic requirements of customers. Bijective soft sets help the designers to effectively map individual customer requirements to the generated design concepts. With the help of Shannon entropy, customers’ preferences among the identified needs are captured in the new product development process, thus, improving the overall effectiveness of the concept evaluation process. This work considers concept evaluation process as a group multiple criteria decision making problem where, design specifications and customer requirements in qualitative form are first captured by using soft set theory and Shannon entropy and then, this information is incorporated in the framework of TOPSIS to identify the best concept in the evaluation process. The developed integrated method for concept evaluation process is validated with the help of a design illustration, which shows that soft set theory can serve as an effective tool for designers and researchers to reduce the imprecise and vague content of early design stages.

Paper strips driven design: Application on doubly curved surfaces

In this paper, we address the challenge of overcoming the problem of developing doubly curved surfaces in product design. Product design uses two kinds of surfaces, developable surfaces and non-developable surfaces, which are also called singly and doubly curved surfaces, respectively. A developable surface has zero Gaussian curvature at all points, while a non-developable surface has non-zero Gaussian curvature at least in some region. Surfaces of many product design object are commonly created as doubly curved shapes to meet requirements of structure and aesthetic. The problem of creating the planar development of 3D surfaces with double curvature in the product design depends on the shape of the surface and the material of the surface cover. Therefore, the method of deriving a pattern is different when external forces are used in order to generate the plane patterns such as paper strips from the case when the plane shape can stretch or deform to fit on the 3D surface. Given a three-dimensional object surface, the first step of the fabrication process is flattening or planar development of this surface into a planar shape so that the manufacturer can not only determine the initial shape of the object but also estimate the strain distribution required to form the shape depending on a material. The paper is analysing and rationalizing doubly curved surface of a given shape by multiple strips of paper glued onto a surface. Results are addressing possibilities of achieving an overall smooth surface and developing a model for the generation of curvature continuous surfaces composed of paper strip surfaces, as well as generating alternative solutions that are in the domain of contemporary product design. The paper illustrates usability and different variations of the proposed design.

Dexterous Grasping Tasks Generated With an Add-on End Effector of a Haptic Feedback System

The simulation of grasping operations in virtual reality (VR) is required for many applications, especially in the domain of industrial product design, but it is very difficult to achieve without any haptic feedback. Force feedback on the fingers can be provided by a hand exoskeleton, but such a device is very complex, invasive, and costly. In this paper, we present a new device, called HaptiHand, which provides position and force input as well as haptic output for four fingers in a noninvasive way, and is mounted on a standard force-feedback arm. The device incorporates four independent modules, one for each finger, inside an ergonomic shape, allowing the user to generate a wide range of virtual hand configurations to grasp naturally an object. It is also possible to reconfigure the virtual finger positions when holding an object. The paper explains how the device is used to control a virtual hand in order to perform dexterous grasping operations. The structure of the HaptiHand is described through the major technical solutions required and tests of key functions serve as validation process for some key requirements. Also, an effective grasping task illustrates some capabilities of the HaptiHand.

The influence of the level of definition of functional specifications on the environmental performances of a complex system. EcoCSP approach

The tendency towards a homogenous mode of development modelled on that of Western countries means that sustainable development has become increasingly urgent. It is necessary to thoroughly redefine products and their expected performances in such a way that the consequences are compatible with sustainable development. In the domain of product design, this means that it is no longer sufficient to use assessment tools “after the fact” to check the impact of products whose functional unit (FU) was defined prior to production; it is now necessary to rethink the definition of the FU itself. This article aims to present an approach based on a combination of life cycle analysis methods and problem-solving by constraint satisfaction. This original approach makes it possible to vary the design of the different dimensions of the FUs of a complex system and thus to make it easier to identify the best architecture along with the best functional definition of the system. In this study, the EcoCSP approach is applied to define the functional performances of an ecological passenger ferry. The complexity of couplings between subsystems and the sheer number of those subsystems mean that the designer has to use “intelligent” tools. These simulate a great number of scenarios and help him/her to fine-tune the system and make the right technological choices with regard to the right functional specifications.

A Probability-Based Hybrid User Model for Recommendation System

With the rapid development of information communication technology, the available information or knowledge is exponentially increased, and this causes the well-known information overload phenomenon. This problem is more serious in product design corporations because over half of the valuable design time is consumed in knowledge acquisition, which highly extends the design cycle and weakens the competitiveness. Therefore, the recommender systems become very important in the domain of product domain. This research presents a probability-based hybrid user model, which is a combination of collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. This hybrid model utilizes user ratings and item topics or classes, which are available in the domain of product design, to predict the knowledge requirement. The comprehensive analysis of the experimental results shows that the proposed method gains better performance in most of the parameter settings. This work contributes a probability-based method to the community for implement recommender system when only user ratings and item topics are available.

A Framework for Automatically Realizing Assembly Sequence Changes in a Virtual Manufacturing Environment

Global market pressures and the rapid evolution of technologies and materials force manufacturers to constantly design, develop and produce new and varied products to maintain a competitive edge. Although virtual design and engineering tools have been key to supporting this fast rate of change, there remains a lack of seamless integration between and within tools across the domains of product, process, and resource design - especially to accommodate change. This research examines how changes to designs within these three domains can be captured and evaluated within a component based engineering tool (vueOne, developed by the Automation Systems Group at the University of Warwick). This paper describes how and where data within these tools can be mapped to quickly evaluate change (where typically a tedious process of data entry is required) decreasing lead times and cost and increasing productivity. The approach is tested on a sub-assembly of a hydrogen fuel cell, where an assembly system is modelled and changes are made to the sequence which is translated through to control logic. Although full implementation has not yet been realized, the concept has the potential to radically change the way changes are made and the approach can be extended to supporting other change types provided the appropriate rules and mapping.

Why is Designing for Developing Countries More Challenging? Modelling the Product Design Domain for Medical Devices

Medical device designs aspire to take into account human factors and ergonomics. However, making these designs affordable and appropriate for developing nations is often challenging, especially when the accepted product cost has to be low. In this paper a theoretical model is presented to explore how creating appropriate designs for developing countries is more challenging than for developed countries. For illustrative purposes the model will take in variables that represent real-world descriptors. The variables relate to functionality, comfort and cost of a certain product. The outcome will describe the appropriateness of the final design. All the variables involved in the design can be assumed to have a certain number of degrees of freedom. These degrees of freedom are the number of independent ways by which the design can change without violating constraints that are imposed on it. In other words it is the number of dimensions in the design domain. The domain is more limited in the developing world and this is caused by the restricted product cost. A design threshold is subsequently set to compute the total volume of acceptable designs within a certain domain. A discrete computation method is used to estimate this volume. The model shows that the number of appropriate designs increases with almost a factor 5 when the accepted cost are doubled, increasing the probability on developing an appropriate medical device that correctly takes into account human factors and ergonomics. Relative to the total design volume, the percentage of acceptable designs drops from 34% to 6% when the allowed cost are halved. These results represent an abstraction of the appropriateness of designs, based on the interaction of selected variables. The model itself will produce different outcomes depending on the parameters that are set. Further verification and validation is needed to assess which values best represent real-world conditions.

Life cycle assessment: A case study of two wind turbines used in Mexico

This paper presents the case study of two wind turbines installed in Mexico which are analyzed using the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. Environmental impacts of different fabrication materials and electricity consumption were studied for the main turbine components. The designs of both turbines were examined through the phases of manufacture, construction, and final disposal. Both turbines (turbine A and turbine B) were of 2.0 megawatts (MW). Results ascertain that the most intensive environmental impacts come from the nacelle and tower components of both turbines; and that within life cycle phases, turbine A influences the environment less than turbine B, specifically during manufacture and final disposal. This study is valuable for decision makers in the domain of technological product design and marketing; in order to determine which features of the wind turbines can be modified to mitigate environmental impacts, contributing to technological innovation in the domains of sustainability and renewable energies in Mexico.

“Digging for Meaning”: The Effect of a Designer’s Expertise and Intention on Depth of Product Metaphors

In the product-design domain, metaphors are used as a means of communication between designers and users. A designer generates a metaphor by deciding on a quality of a target to highlight and selecting a corresponding source that conveys this quality; the user interprets the designer’s intentions via the end product. The depth of the generated metaphor can be assessed by the extent to which the highlighted quality is salient for the target: Metaphors focusing on a salient quality of the target are termed “surface” metaphors, whereas those focusing on a non-salient quality are called “deep” metaphors. In this article, we investigated both the effect of the expertise level of the designer (i.e., novice or expert) and different types of intention (i.e., pragmatic or experiential) on metaphor depth, through a study in which groups of expert and novice designers were asked to generate metaphors and external judges evaluated the depth of the metaphors created. Results indicated that having a pragmatic intention or being a novice designer led to the generation of surface metaphors, whereas having experiential intentions or being an expert facilitated the generation of deeper metaphors. Detailed observations are included regarding the nature of decisions made during the product metaphor generation process that produce comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing metaphors. Additionally, our findings have implications for metaphor research and design practice.

Comparing personal characteristic factors of imagination between expert and novice designers within different product design stages

Imagination plays a key role in various domains in helping to create innovative ideas, drawings, poems, movies, products, etc. In product design domain, the personal characteristics of imagination are crucial abilities for conceiving novel ideas during design processes. This study focuses on personal characteristic differences and similarities between expert and novice designers for triggering imagination during four design stages. Using the semantic differential method, this study conducted a questionnaire with ten-paired personal characteristics, and analyzed several identical and different characteristics of expert and novice designers in the process of product design. In sum, the similarities and differentials of personal characteristics between expert and novice designers within four product design stages will be concluded at the end of this paper.

A Representation-Based Methodology for Developing High-Value Knowledge Engineering Software Products: Theory, Application, and Implementation

Most enterprises, technology and otherwise, are routinely collecting massive amounts of unstructured information from customer interactions and then attempting to extract knowledge from this information in order to improve core activities such as product development, customer support, and marketing. The knowledge engineering processes for extracting knowledge from this information are often largely manual and extremely inefficient in both cost and time. Therefore, software automation of these manual activities through the creation of highly user-centric Knowledge Engineering Software Products (KESPs) is critical to enabling the rapid and efficient extraction of high-quality knowledge. The primary intent of this paper is to provide a comprehensive theory, including its application and implementation, for developing high-value Knowledge Engineering Software Products. To this end, we have created a representation-based approach to the design and development of KESPs. The theoretical framework of our representational-based approach is the integrated metarepresentational model (IMRM) which provides a natural sequence of representations for guiding the development of complex artifacts such as KESPs. The application of the IMRM to the development of high-value KESPs resulted in the integrated representation-based process methodology (IRPM) which combines, in a rational and structured manner, methods and tools from the technical domains of Knowledge Engineering, Product Design, and Software Engineering. Each domain contributes a distinct set of methods to the IRPM. The knowledge engineering domain provides tools—such as the CommonKADS Agent/Task model—for modeling current work processes that the KESP will automate. The product design domain provides formal tools—such as the House of Quality, Function Structure, Morphological Matrix, and Utility Function—for explicitly defining the user needs for the KESP, and for exploring different design concepts in order to ensure the KESP is high-quality and low-cost. The software engineering domain provides tools—such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Case, Component, and Class diagrams—in order to ensure that a reliable and easy to use KESP is delivered on time and within budget. We have demonstrated the feasibility of the IRPM by implementing it within the context of a real knowledge engineering problem involving the extraction of problem-solution pairs from customer service requests in order to create “smart” products and services. The developed KESP, called the “Service Request Portal” (SRP), used search and content filters to achieve a 30% productivity improvement over the previously manual work process.

The role of simulation in digital manufacturing: applications and outlook

Digital manufacturing technologies have been considered an essential part of the continuous effort towards the reduction in a product’s development time and cost, as well as towards the expansion in customisation options. The simulation-based technologies constitute a focal point of digital manufacturing solutions, since they allow for the experimentation and validation of different product, process and manufacturing system configurations. This article investigates simulation-based applications in a series of different technological and manufacturing domains. First, this article discusses the current industrial practice, focusing on the use of information technology. Next, a series of simulation-based solutions are explored in the domains of product and production process design, as well as in the area of enterprise resource planning. The current technologies and research trends are discussed in the context of the new landscape of computing hardware technologies and the emerging computing services, including the initiatives comprising both the Internet cloud and the Internet of things.

6.5.2 MBSE Supports Manufacturing System Design

AbstractTo date, Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has been deployed primarily in the product design domain. However, manufacturing system design problems are equally challenging, but there are many fewer design support tools in the hands of system designers. This paper describes how MBSE principles and methods can be used to make a powerful analysis tool readily accessible to manufacturing systems engineers. The MagicDraw™ SysML tool was used to create a domain specific language for electronics assembly, and the tool itself was customized to present an interface that was relatively easy for the manufacturing domain experts to use to create descriptions of products, resources, and processes. The domain specific language was mapped to a metamodel of the Arena™ discrete event simulation language, and the ATL© model transformation tool was used to automate the generation of the an instance of a simulation model from an instance of the electronics assembly system. The use of this kind of analysis automation can reduce by up to a factor of ten the time required to develop such simulation models.

Online Semantic Knowledge Management for Product Design Based on Product Engineering Ontologies

This paper formulates an approach to use the semantic web for knowledge management in the product design domain to provide enhanced capabilities of authoring/updating, querying/reasoning, searching, and visualization of information. Engineering has unique challenges, due to the pervasive use of CAD models and underlying interoperability and integration issues. The authors propose a distributed model composed of a host hybrid-data repository, external public linked data sources, a semantic data management engine, and a web-based user interface layer. The hybrid-data repository consists of ontologies to preserve knowledge for the product design domain and a conventional product data base to utilize legacy design data. Near full integration with a web based environment is achieved. The importance of accessing product related CAD data that has been instantiated in ontology models, querying them, and then displaying the data on a web interface in real time with other legacy data, such as hand sketches and notes that have been scanned and relevant information from conventional rational databases public linked data sites, is a useful and transformational capability. The system clearly facilitates design and information management beyond traditional CAD capabilities and creates a foundation for important capability improvements in the domain.

Investigating an “Internet of Hybrid Products”: Assembling Products, Interactions, Services, and Networks through Design

Abstract This article takes up the relations between products, people, and the Internet. Our investigation is set in the context of the emergence of networked and service-driven physical products. The article builds upon the curation and design of an exhibition that pulls together recent hybrids composed of physical objects as well as digital things and networked services. Through investigating this selection of both prototypical and widely available consumer products, we seek to understand how the previously-separate domains of product, interaction, and service design might be combined in order to design and research new hybrid products, services, and interactions. Taken together, these investigations point toward an “Internet of Hybrid Products” that draws heavily from social practices in networked media that is already highly branded and in urgent need of attention from design research.