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Journal papers by Kilian Gericke
Design Science, 2020
Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ong... more Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice. This article takes the position that the transfer of design methods alone is not an appropriate indicator for assessing the impact of design research by discussing alternative pathways for impacting design practice. Impact is created by different meansfirst of all through the students that are trained based on the research results including design methods and tools and by the systematic way of thinking they acquired that comes along with being involved with research in this area. Despite having a considerable impact on practice, this article takes the position that the transfer of methods can be improved by moving from cultivating method menageries to facilitating the evolution of method ecosystems. It explains what is understood by a method ecosystem and discusses implications for developing future design methods and for improving existing methods. This paper takes the position that efforts on improving and maturing existing design methods should be raised to satisfy the needs of designers and to truly support them.
Design Science, 2022
Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express ... more Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method's tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method's intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.
Journal of Mechanical Design, 2016
This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods... more This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design practice and industry. This prevents design practitioners from accessing the rich body of research and knowledge posed by academia. Various web platforms and textbooks allow users to discover or search for design methods, but little support is provided to assess whether or not a method is appropriate for the context or the task at hand. In this exploratory study, interviews were conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Interview responses were coded and analyzed in an effort to understand the patterns in searching, selecting, assessing, and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice. This analysis showed that interviewees would like to search for design methods based on their desired outcomes. Additionally, interviewees considered their personal contacts to be the most valuable source of new methods. These insights show that web-based communities of practice may be a potential link between academia and industry, but existing web repositories and communities require further development in order to better meet the needs of the design practitioner community.
Design Science, 2017
Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and manag... more Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and managing the processes by which they are developed. In practice, companies maintain networks of many interrelated models which need to be synthesised in the minds of their users when considering issues that cut across them. This article considers how information from product and design process models can be integrated with a view to help manage these complex interrelationships. A framework highlighting key issues surrounding model integration is introduced and terminology for describing these issues is developed. To illustrate the framework and terminology, selected modelling approaches that integrate product and process information are discussed and organised according to their levels and forms of integration. Opportunities for further work to advance integrated modelling in engineering design research and practice are discussed.
Artificial intelligence for engineering design analysis and manufacturing, 2017
Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches ... more Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches over the last decades. Each of these is meant to support designers in their design endeavors. Industrial practice is excessively diversified in terms of contextual requirements, aims, and adopted processes; this automatically begs the question which of the existing models should be selected for application in a specific situation. This paper sets out to contribute to this discourse. It strives to benchmark the fairly novel integrated function modeling (IFM) framework against the well-established function structures modeling approach. The paper comparatively investigates the respective capabilities of the approaches, following the benchmarking protocol used earlier in relation to this Special Issue. Function structures are used as reference as they represent one of the most widespread function modeling approaches in research and practice. Both function structures and the IFM framework are exemplarily applied for modeling a glue gun. The gradual generation and refinement of the models is used to showcase their respective benefits and shortcomings. Eventually, the IFM framework is found to excel over function structures in terms of comprehensiveness and support for different types of function analyses. Finally, future research directions are proposed.
Artificial intelligence for engineering design analysis and manufacturing, 2013
Conference papers by Kilian Gericke
Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based o... more Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based on the method's name and stage of use. Little support is provided to assess whether a method is appropriate for the task at hand and the context where the method will be applied. In this explorative study, patterns in searching, selecting, assessing and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice were analyzed across a range of disciplines. This work reports on our findings from interviews conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Several similarities in the way practitioners find, select and assess new methods were found and interesting differences were identified for the practices in exchanging experiences with peers. In this work, we present the findings of our interview study along with directions for future work to better understand design processes in professional practice.
Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to ac... more Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to academia to provide tools and methods to support them. The Modelling and Managing of Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of the Design Society aims to support industry in understanding, modelling and running design processes by bringing together a community of design researchers and interacting with industry by identifying research challenges and working together to resolve them. This paper maps out research challenges for MMEP and reflects over some of the challenges we have as a research community in meeting these ambitious goals. This paper begins by presenting an ambitious research roadmap developed in 2008 and then compares the roadmap with the research topics that current members of the MMEP SIG are working on before reflecting on how and where we have made progress and what would be serious progress in this area. Based on the analyses of research topics and progress, the paper concludes with a discussion of the evolution of research topics and associated challenges for design research, and sketches measures required for improving our efficacy as a research community.
The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitio... more The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework's usefulness and practical applicability. It allows flexibly adaptive modeling multiple, interrelated views onto the functionality of (interdisciplinary) systems. The findings suggests a large potential for the framework to support cross-disciplinary design and for using the inherent matrices to do function analysis. The paper highlights the views of the practitioners on the strengths and potentials for further improvement.
This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML wi... more This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML with the aim of deriving specific potentials for cross-fertilisation and further improvement regarding their application for function modelling in interdisciplinary design. The presented comparison comprises literature reviews as well as the practical application of both the IFM framework and SysML for modelling the functionality of an exemplary mechatronic system. The research leads to the identification of advantages and shortcomings in both approaches. Based on these insights, the paper further presents a conceptual adaptation of the IFM framework with the intention to improve its practical applicability and reducing modelling efforts.
While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models tha... more While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models that integrate the two type of models. Those that exist are research systems, which even if validated in industry do not have a broad uptake to date. This paper develops an integrated framework for product and process models based on the purpose the models are put it building on a model of Browning and Ramasesh. Selected integrated model are classified according to the framework. This revealed the no model to date gives equal weight to product and process models.
Design Science, 2020
Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ong... more Supporting designers is one of the main motivations for design research. However, there is an ongoing debate about the ability of design research to transfer its results, which are often provided in form of design methods, into practice. This article takes the position that the transfer of design methods alone is not an appropriate indicator for assessing the impact of design research by discussing alternative pathways for impacting design practice. Impact is created by different meansfirst of all through the students that are trained based on the research results including design methods and tools and by the systematic way of thinking they acquired that comes along with being involved with research in this area. Despite having a considerable impact on practice, this article takes the position that the transfer of methods can be improved by moving from cultivating method menageries to facilitating the evolution of method ecosystems. It explains what is understood by a method ecosystem and discusses implications for developing future design methods and for improving existing methods. This paper takes the position that efforts on improving and maturing existing design methods should be raised to satisfy the needs of designers and to truly support them.
Design Science, 2022
Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express ... more Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method's tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method's intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.
Journal of Mechanical Design, 2016
This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods... more This work seeks to understand how design practitioners discover, select, and adapt design methods and methodologies. Design methods and methodologies are mainly used for educational purposes and are not formally transferred into design practice and industry. This prevents design practitioners from accessing the rich body of research and knowledge posed by academia. Various web platforms and textbooks allow users to discover or search for design methods, but little support is provided to assess whether or not a method is appropriate for the context or the task at hand. In this exploratory study, interviews were conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Interview responses were coded and analyzed in an effort to understand the patterns in searching, selecting, assessing, and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice. This analysis showed that interviewees would like to search for design methods based on their desired outcomes. Additionally, interviewees considered their personal contacts to be the most valuable source of new methods. These insights show that web-based communities of practice may be a potential link between academia and industry, but existing web repositories and communities require further development in order to better meet the needs of the design practitioner community.
Design Science, 2017
Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and manag... more Models of products and design processes are key to interacting with engineering designs and managing the processes by which they are developed. In practice, companies maintain networks of many interrelated models which need to be synthesised in the minds of their users when considering issues that cut across them. This article considers how information from product and design process models can be integrated with a view to help manage these complex interrelationships. A framework highlighting key issues surrounding model integration is introduced and terminology for describing these issues is developed. To illustrate the framework and terminology, selected modelling approaches that integrate product and process information are discussed and organised according to their levels and forms of integration. Opportunities for further work to advance integrated modelling in engineering design research and practice are discussed.
Artificial intelligence for engineering design analysis and manufacturing, 2017
Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches ... more Research and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches over the last decades. Each of these is meant to support designers in their design endeavors. Industrial practice is excessively diversified in terms of contextual requirements, aims, and adopted processes; this automatically begs the question which of the existing models should be selected for application in a specific situation. This paper sets out to contribute to this discourse. It strives to benchmark the fairly novel integrated function modeling (IFM) framework against the well-established function structures modeling approach. The paper comparatively investigates the respective capabilities of the approaches, following the benchmarking protocol used earlier in relation to this Special Issue. Function structures are used as reference as they represent one of the most widespread function modeling approaches in research and practice. Both function structures and the IFM framework are exemplarily applied for modeling a glue gun. The gradual generation and refinement of the models is used to showcase their respective benefits and shortcomings. Eventually, the IFM framework is found to excel over function structures in terms of comprehensiveness and support for different types of function analyses. Finally, future research directions are proposed.
Artificial intelligence for engineering design analysis and manufacturing, 2013
Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based o... more Web platforms and literature on design methods allow users to search for existing methods based on the method's name and stage of use. Little support is provided to assess whether a method is appropriate for the task at hand and the context where the method will be applied. In this explorative study, patterns in searching, selecting, assessing and exchanging experiences with peers in professional practice were analyzed across a range of disciplines. This work reports on our findings from interviews conducted with practicing engineers and designers. Several similarities in the way practitioners find, select and assess new methods were found and interesting differences were identified for the practices in exchanging experiences with peers. In this work, we present the findings of our interview study along with directions for future work to better understand design processes in professional practice.
Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to ac... more Managing complex engineering design processes is a challenge for industry, which is looking to academia to provide tools and methods to support them. The Modelling and Managing of Engineering Processes Special Interest Group of the Design Society aims to support industry in understanding, modelling and running design processes by bringing together a community of design researchers and interacting with industry by identifying research challenges and working together to resolve them. This paper maps out research challenges for MMEP and reflects over some of the challenges we have as a research community in meeting these ambitious goals. This paper begins by presenting an ambitious research roadmap developed in 2008 and then compares the roadmap with the research topics that current members of the MMEP SIG are working on before reflecting on how and where we have made progress and what would be serious progress in this area. Based on the analyses of research topics and progress, the paper concludes with a discussion of the evolution of research topics and associated challenges for design research, and sketches measures required for improving our efficacy as a research community.
The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitio... more The paper presents an evaluation study for a DSM-based function modeling framework with practitioners in industry. Questionnaires and open discussion are used in a workshop format to obtain feedback on the framework's usefulness and practical applicability. It allows flexibly adaptive modeling multiple, interrelated views onto the functionality of (interdisciplinary) systems. The findings suggests a large potential for the framework to support cross-disciplinary design and for using the inherent matrices to do function analysis. The paper highlights the views of the practitioners on the strengths and potentials for further improvement.
This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML wi... more This paper presents a comparison between the Integrated Function Modelling framework and SysML with the aim of deriving specific potentials for cross-fertilisation and further improvement regarding their application for function modelling in interdisciplinary design. The presented comparison comprises literature reviews as well as the practical application of both the IFM framework and SysML for modelling the functionality of an exemplary mechatronic system. The research leads to the identification of advantages and shortcomings in both approaches. Based on these insights, the paper further presents a conceptual adaptation of the IFM framework with the intention to improve its practical applicability and reducing modelling efforts.
While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models tha... more While product models and process models have a long standing transiting, there are few models that integrate the two type of models. Those that exist are research systems, which even if validated in industry do not have a broad uptake to date. This paper develops an integrated framework for product and process models based on the purpose the models are put it building on a model of Browning and Ramasesh. Selected integrated model are classified according to the framework. This revealed the no model to date gives equal weight to product and process models.
Lean product development has been developed and deployed in an effort to enhance company operatio... more Lean product development has been developed and deployed in an effort to enhance company operations. Understanding value is the first step to becoming 'Lean'. However, the mere translation of value from its conventional interpretation in lean production as``something the customer will pay for`` does not equate to an effective value orientation in product development (PD). In order to better understand the theoretical context of PD value in research, as well as the potential application of a value orientation in practice, further study is necessary. This paper aims to broaden the understanding of PD value by discussing by linking roles in value creation and delivery to different contexts and phases of the product life cycle.
Seit Anfang des Jahres hat das Coronavirus innerhalb kürzester Zeit unser wirtschaftliches und öf... more Seit Anfang des Jahres hat das Coronavirus innerhalb kürzester Zeit unser wirtschaftliches und öffentliches Leben in seinen Grundfesten erschüttert. Seitdem befinden wir uns in einem permanenten Krisenzustand, und Ereignisse wie unsere Tagung können nicht in der gewohnten Weise stattfinden. Das Wort Krise setzt sich im Chinesischen aus zwei Zeichen zusammen (危機) - das eine bedeutet Gefahr, das andere Chance. Während die Pandemie weiterhin eine große Gefahr für unsere Gesundheit darstellt, schafft sie auch Chancen, insbesondere im Bereich der Digitalisierung. Nicht nur Bereiche wie die Bildung, sondern auch die Wirtschaft werden durch digitale Technologien einen stärkeren Schub erhalten. In den Entwicklungs- und Konstruktionsabteilungen zum Beispiel bieten sie vielversprechende Möglichkeiten, Arbeitsabläufe nachhaltig zu optimieren. Langfristig wird sich sowohl die räumliche als auch die zeitliche Verteilung der Arbeit an den während der Krise neu festgelegten Standards orientieren. Mobiles Arbeiten wird sich als alternative Arbeitsform etablieren. Neben den offensichtlichen Vorteilen wird das mobile Arbeiten aber auch die Kommunikation zwischen den verschiedenen Akteuren der Produktentwicklung weiter erschweren. Neben den Veränderungen in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen den verschiedenen Akteuren wird auch die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Mensch und Maschine weiter forciert. Die Etablierung von autonomen Prozessen für Maschinen und Anlagen oder die Möglichkeit ihrer Fernwartung schafft eine hohe Flexibilität des Personals in Bezug auf seinen Arbeitsplatz und wird damit stärker in den Fokus rücken. Eine weitere Anstrengung wird darin bestehen, die Zuverlässigkeit der Modellierung und Simulationen weiter zu verbessern und die Lücke zwischen dem realen Verhalten des Produkts und dem Verhalten seines virtuellen Abbildes zu schließen. Dadurch wird es möglich sein, die Anzahl der physischen Muster zu reduzieren, was nicht nur die Kosten senken, sondern auch die Flexibilität des Arbeitsplatzes erhöhen würde. All diese Herausford [...]
Proceedings of the Design Society, Jul 27, 2021
DS 84: Proceedings of the DESIGN 2016 14th International Design Conference, 2016
Proceedings of the Design Society, Jul 1, 2023
Proceedings of the Design Society, Jul 27, 2021
Proceedings of the Design Society: DESIGN Conference, May 1, 2020
Proceedings of the Design Society, Jul 27, 2021
Routledge eBooks, Dec 29, 2020
Springer eBooks, Dec 5, 2020
This paper categorises and describes the design stages, stakeholders and decision processes of an... more This paper categorises and describes the design stages, stakeholders and decision processes of an overcapacity boiler upgrade that came about from the excessive use of design margins. Using a hospital case study, the reason behind the overcapacity and excessive margins is explored using semi-structured interviews, document analysis and process modelling. Design margins arise from a lack of systemic thinking during the design and installation phases. It is likely that margins are added as a matter of habit with no real thought to their applicability, calling into question the design process
