Understanding team diversity has become essential for modern-day organisations. This study explores the impact of knowledge diversity in design teams through computational simulations. By analysing design space characteristics, we study how diverse teams perform compared to less diverse counterparts. Results reveal that highly diverse teams exhibit increased efficiency, quicker convergence, and larger but sparser design spaces. This work contributes to understanding the impact of knowledge diversity in design teams and sets the stage for future systematic studies of diversity.

Traditional product teardown exercises, while educationally valuable, are resource-intensive and environmentally unsustainable. By leveraging affordable 3D scanning and CAD modeling tools, an approach is proposed for the creation of virtual product replicas that can be used to reduce costs, environmental impact,and logistical constraints of product teardowns. Two case studies—a leaf blower and a hand mixer—demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology. The case studies also demonstrate that 3D scanning is particularly advantageous for capturing complex geometries, while CAD modeling is more efficient for simpler components with straightforward geometries. The integration of both techniques ensures that the strengths of each approach are maximized, leading to substantial time savings in creating assembly models. The study confirms that high-quality 3D models for virtual product teardowns can be created using a combination of affordable reverse engineering approaches, making it a viable solution for educational settings.

Recently, the design and digitalisation approaches have become increasingly utilised in the legal context, typically under the names of legal design and legal tech. One of their goals is to help legal practitioners be more efficient and to provide better quality and more comprehensive legal services. Also, given that both movements rely heavily on participatory and co-design, they will require increased support not only from design practitioners but also from design researchers and educators. Therefore, this paper investigates, from a design research viewpoint, the opportunities and challenges of developing and implementing legal tech, with a particular focus on legal practitioners. It reports on four cases of designing legal tech solutions and their implementation in a law firm. The main insights are related to the importance of value perception through participatory and co-design, the need for efficient and effective testing methodologies, and the opportunity to test a wide range of design methods and tools in the legal context. The paper also complements the legal design and legal tech literature with additional arguments on why designing in the legal context is challenging compared to designing in other domains.

Studies revealed that, while collaborating, humans tend to synchronise on multiple levels (e.g., neurocognitive or physiological). Inter-brain synchrony has been linked to improved problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity. Nevertheless, studies on synchrony in design teams started to emerge only recently. This study contributes to this stream of research by utilising a computational model of a design team to explore the relationships between team cohesion, synchrony, and team performance. The experiments revealed a positive link between team cohesion level and the emergence of (cognitive) synchrony. Furthermore, cohesive teams were found to be more efficient, converging quicker and producing solutions at a higher rate. In addition, the diversity of the solutions generated by highly cohesive teams tends to increase over time. Teams in medium- and low-cohesive settings initially generate highly diverse solutions, but such diversity decreases as the simulation progresses. Finally, highly-cohesive teams were found to be prone to premature convergence.

The successful collaboration of team members plays a crucial role in product development. Research of different teamwork factors may help understand the process, and computer simulation can be a suitable method of achieving this goal. This work aims to give an overview of agent-based modelling of product development teams and survey existing models that tackle this problem. Some tools and frameworks for agent-based modelling will be described with an emphasis on parallel and distributed architectures which are used to improve performance and enable very big and complex simulations.

Emerging digital technologies enable capturing of a product’s digital footprint through continuous monitoring of its performance, usage, and working environment while using data acquired by its embedded sensors. However, it seems that product development (PD) teams, within engineering companies, have not yet embraced the usage of sensor data acquired by smart products (SPs) when conducting PD activities. This study discusses several challenges that hinder a broader utilization of SP's sensor data, within PD. In addition to the literature review, the discussion is supported with empirical data gathered through a qualitative exploratory case study conducted in a large engineering and manufacturing company. As a result, three challenges are outlined. First, it is challenging for the company's management and PD team to gain transparency over the benefits of sensor data utilization for PD. Second, solutions providing accessibility and visualization of gathered data should be tailored to the PD activities and teams, which requires a holistic understanding. Finally, it is suggested that new skills, roles and processes should be introduced, in order to enable SP's sensor data utilization, within PD activities. 

The concept of emergence has roots in systems complexity and dynamics, with prominent impact in contemporary science and in design, analysis, and governance of complex engineering systems. It is almost impossible to effectively model emergence within the dynamics of systems, due to the obscurity of its nature and imperfection of our information on its relational systemic interactions. Thus, paying attention to basic meta-questions about emergent properties of complex engineering systems is crucially important in understanding both the trajectories of evolution of systems and correspondingly the patterns of system behaviour. From this trajectorial/behavioural perspective, emergence and dynamics are considered as very close concepts: understanding the variables of one can be realised by tracing and modelling the other. This chapter reviews and summarises the topics of emergence and dynamics through their applications in six case examples. Six studies conducted by researchers around the world are selected, representing a portfolio of cases studied with multiple theoretical foundations, levels of scope, application domains of engineering systems design, phenomena of emergence, and modelling methods used that detect and identify emergence through dynamics. The case reviews provide a gateway to comprehending emergence in systems through emphasising the dynamics of interactions.

The development of immersive virtual reality (IVR) applications for design reviews is a major trend in the design field. While many different applications have been developed, there is little consensus on the functionalities necessary for these applications. This paper proposes a classification scheme for IVR functionalities related to design reviews (DRs), combining conceptual-to-empirical and empirical-to-conceptual strategies. The classification scheme consists of eight class categories (Input, Representation, Navigation, Manipulation, Collaboration, Edit, Creation, and Output), 22 class subcategories, and 55 classes. The classification scheme has been validated by analysing several commercial IVR applications for DRs. As part of the classification scheme development, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was utilised to review 70 articles that develop IVR applications for DRs. The results from systematic literature reviews suggest the development of solutions that integrate several class categories, are better connected to current design workflows, include various design information, support a DR planning cycle, and support distributed work. The proposed classification scheme helps to orient the future development of IVR applications for DRs and provides a framework to systematically accumulate evidence on the effect of such applications on DRs.

When observing a design space expansion during teamwork, several studies found that cumulative solution-related issues' occurrence follows a linear trend. Such findings contradict the hypothesis of solution-related issues being characteristic for the later design stages. This work relies on agent-based simulations to explore the emerging patterns in design solution space expansion during teamwork. The results demonstrate trends that accord with the empirical findings, suggesting that a cognitive effort in solution space expansion remains constant throughout a design session. The collected data on agents' cognitive processes and solution space properties enabled additional insights, which led to the detection of four distinct regimes of design solution space expansion.