Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Along with diversification of customer and market needs, it is now essential to develop products with concern of not only functional value of the products, but also customer value. Such product development would involve collaboration of industrial designers and engineering designers, but because their backgrounds often differ, it is challenging for them to work collaboratively. What this study focuses on is how the gap between industrial designers and engineering designers can be bridged, by investigating characteristics of the research in each design domain. Along with the investigation, it explores future research issues to be addressed for promoting the collaborative design between industrial designers and engineering designers, as well as to derive the collaborative design process to be conducted by addressing the issues. This study analyzes the differences between the central research themes dealt in industrial design and engineering design domains, by reviewing the papers published in Design Studies and Journal of Engineering Design during 2006-2015, from the viewpoint of multispace design model: an interdisciplinary model which allows comprehensive descriptions of various design object characteristics. The results show that much of the research in Design Studies has sought to understand the relation between design strategies and quality of design concepts, whereas the research in Journal of Engineering Design has strong interest on feasibility and producibility of design outputs and how the quality and performance of the outputs can be evaluated quantitatively. Based on these findings, numbers of addressing issues to be studied are discussed for achieving the enhancement of collaborative design.