Conference Agenda

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive tool that supports sustainability by assessing products’ environmental impacts. It is both analytical and systemic. However, its integration in the early phases of product development remains challenging for industrial designers. How do industrial designers make sense of it? How do you move from LCA into the early stages of design? Particularly, the clash between the analytical, deductive, delimiting, and multi-criteria parameters of LCA with the divergent abductive reasoning of the fuzzy front end of concept development.

In the paper, we present an example of an LCA design course, which was structured to meet the challenge of how to redesign a product. The course serves as an experimental example of integration and conversion from deductive, quantitative, and analytical LCA to an abductive, qualitative, design thinking process of reconceptualization. In this context, we identify patterns in the disparity across the level of design work. Two approaches, in particular, made a difference: 1) when SWOT factors were categorised according to life cycle stages, circular economy stages and/or circular product design methods, then it qualified the transition to mind mapping, 2) when the mind-map unfolded complexity in 4 or more levels, it enabled deeper insights on factors itself, implementation, relationships and trade-offs to other life stages, specific strategies and circular value propositions. In the case of both, the mind map served as a dynamic tool, used throughout concept development, to bridge the problem/solution space, as well as facilitate framing, rather than pre-stage guiding concept development.

This paper intends to critically assess the attributes of unintended interaction patterns that influence rationality and behaviour towards the mainstream product. Several problems uncover in current practices whether photo-based research can be used to support a scientific design research. Based on previous studies, 15 out of 100 preliminary images representing the context of the use of the product in different ways have been assessed based on users’ perceptions, which analysed 32 attributes representing four dimensions extracted from the notion of unintended behaviour research. The user critically assessed and presented the four highest attributes of each dimension. At this point, the designer used photo-based analysis to evaluate four attributes of unintended interaction that represent four dimensions. A photo was used as the subject of research, transformed into a series of assessment criteria, and thoroughly examined according to Pauwels' theoretical framework of visual analysis. Thirty designers from four distinct levels of experience in product design received the survey to assess the reliability of visual analysis. The study's findings reveal a notable descriptive pattern across several dimensions, resulting in the identification of aspects of unintentional interactions between human rationales and behaviours in mainstream products. This study suggests that it will help designers broaden their understanding of how to identify users' demands in the design thinking process by analysing the reasons behind unintended actions and human contact with mainstream products.

The product design process involves a set of stages, however, there may be many methods that can be used to resolve the different stages of the process, which will be conditioned by the nature of the project or its magnitude. Beyond this, in most cases the time will come when the color, texture, finishes or final appearance of the product (CMF) will have to be defined (Ugale et al., 2022), so there is a tendency to make iterations of the possible combinations of these elements with the idea that the product achieves the function as expected, that the user can interpret and perceive it in the way desired by the designer and it is at this point where Artificial Intelligence tools (AI) could impact by simplifying the process. In this sense, this research aims to identify the impact that applying the Gencraft® artificial intelligence tool would have in the details design stage and its implications in the teaching-learning process of students of the Bachelor of Design (Bailey, 2023).

To achieve the purpose of the research, a sample of 22 students from the sixth and eighth semester of the Bachelor of Design at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, was taken to use the Gencraft® tool in the design stage of details of their projects, instructing them to progressively add the prompts until the generated images were close to the product they had already designed, paying attention to the CMFs suggested by the tool up to a total of 12 prompts. Once the exercise was completed, a survey-type instrument was applied to the students to assess the impact of using the tool and the potential it could have within the design process.

With the analysis of the information, it was possible to identify that the eighth semester students have had much more experience in the use of AI for the design process than those in the sixth semester, however, most of both groups agree that the tool used It could also have a lot of value in the conceptualization or ideation stage since the images generated look like product renders. With respect to the CMFs, the majority agree that the main contribution is the final appearance part and a little less in the color part. The students also stated that despite the number of prompts they provided to the tool, there was very little coincidence with the design they had already defined in terms of the final configuration.

With this research it was possible to identify that the artificial intelligence tool used is considered positively by the students within their learning process and as a useful element within the design of products. On the other hand, it was observed that the students began having some difficulties generating the correct prompts or making the tool generate images that were closer to the product design they already had. Likewise, it was evident that they did take the images generated by Gencraft@ as a reference to define the CFMs of their projects.

Design studio pedagogy is the principal teaching method used in design education. The studio environment promotes learning through engagement with real-life projects that are typically ill-defined and supported by a design tutor. While learning is rooted in an experiential modality (learn-by-doing), the why of the designing (purpose, methods and tools) mostly remains implicit. The differing nature of design projects means that systematic approaches are seldom used, therefore students must understand the fundamentals of the discipline to succeed.

This research paper presents a pilot case-study on the integration of a Community of Inquiry (COI) approach into the design studio aimed at subverting the implicit nature of design education. The COI framework is taken from Lipman and Sharp’s 1970s reimagining of philosophy for children, in which inquiry through communal dialogue is used to explore the philosophy of a discipline. In the adapted version presented here, the discourse revolves around the principles of design and emerging artefacts (sketches or prototypes), the design tutor becomes the facilitator who labels design moves and models design skills, and the stimuli are democratically selected design projects.

Survey results provide insights into students’ experiences along with their challenges with this approach. Observations of students’ design tendencies along with their design outcomes are also presented. In addition, the rationale for integrating COI, along with how it was adapted for use in a first-year product design module will be outlined, along with challenges, benefits, and learnings for future implementation.

There are different population groups that present conditions and require special considerations within the product design process, such as the elderly. The UN defines “an older person as a person who is over 60 years of age “(2020). The present research focuses on the development and implementation of a specially structured design process based on said segment of the population divided into four stages: Research, Conceptual design, Detailed design and Implementation.

As part of the methodology, a literature review was done to define the stages and elements necessary to apply the design process proposed (Hanington & Martin, 2012), and the structure suggested in the analytical program of the course was taken as a basis. Once the process was defined, it was implemented in a sample of two groups of students of the Product Design degree studying the sixth semester of the Tecnologico de Monterrey (30 students in total), who developed product design projects (14 in total) for a nursing home in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. During the course, the students visited the nursing home on several occasions identifying a problematic situation through observation and interviews with the elderly people and their caregivers, they also had numerous interactions to present their ideas and validate the iterations of prototypes.

At the end of the course, a survey-type instrument was applied to the students to evaluate the impact of the model on their educational experience and to validate the special characteristics of the process proposed in this research. As a result, they positively evaluated all stages of the process, highlighting the Detailed Design stage as the one that contributes the most value to the development of their disciplinary competencies and pointed out the Implementation stage as the most challenging. Likewise, the students positively assessed the nursing home personnel's participation in the project's development, emphasizing its importance during the Research stage. On the other hand, the students recognized the differences of this design process compared with their previous experiences in other Design courses.

The development of the project had an impact that transcends the practical aspects, working with elderly people implies deepening empathy with them and considering their vulnerability, also paying attention to their human dignity due to the dependence they have on other people to attend their basic needs. Students also recognize the value of distinct types of users who interact with the products. In this sense, the relevance of the personnel was observed; they constantly experience situations of deprivation when attending their basic needs.

In conclusion, it was possible to determine that the design process proposed in this research allows the development of products that meet real needs that tend to go unnoticed due to the lack of consideration of the different users, where each of them may have a different perception of the same activity simply because of the way in which it is related to it, as occurs in this case between the elderly person, their family and the caregiver at the nursing home.