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Selection of the design concepts is one of the significant activities in product development process. Most of the products are usually failed due to inappropriate decision during the selection of the design concepts at the early stage of product development process. The determination of the greatest selection of design concepts at the conceptual design stage is a crucial decision due to a poor design concept which can never be compensated for by a good detailed design and it will implicate great expense of redesign cost. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one available method in forming a systematic approach for a single decision maker or a group decision maker, is employed to solve such problem. In this paper, 7 design concepts of wheelchair designs were considered as a case study. The AHP through utilizing Expert Choice software was implemented to determine the most suitable design concept of wheelchair design at the conceptual design stage. The sensitivity analysis was performed to test the stability of the priority ranking and to increase the confidence in the selection of design concepts.

This research aims to explore various definitions of sustainability and sustainable design and determine the researcher's understanding of sustainable design concepts. In the past decades under the three elements of sustainability, between 1975 and 2021. This study is to conceptually construct sustainable design. It enhances and widens previous research to comprehend sustainable design. To this aim, a systematic review of the relevant collection of literature on sustainability and sustainable design will be conducted, guided by two questions: What is sustainable design? Do the sustainable design definitions involve economic, social and environmental elements? Since the concept of sustainability is to balance environmental, economic and social elements in product and service design.

The author conducts an inductive content analysis of concepts and definitions mentioned or discussed in several journals, a total of 573 articles were published, with a clear definition of sustainable design included in the review process. In the analysis, 56 definitions have been used.

In the analysis, 56 definitions for environments, environmental design, environmental innovations, social design, eco-efficiency, eco-design, ecological product, environmentally friendly product and the concept of sustainable design have been used. The most often used definition, according to the research analysis, is sustainable design. This research found sustainable design definitions might be unclear and the concepts could be misunderstood. Thus, the goal of this research was to provide an effective system for sustainable design definitions, with adequate flexibility to create obvious differences to encourage further research in this field to develop comprehensive definitions for essential concepts, the different definitions of sustainable design show a lack of understanding of the real meaning of the concepts. As a result, these inconsistencies are likely to restrict future research and the adaptation of sustainable design concepts in the industry.

The development of sustainable design concepts and definitions, as used by many authors and organizations, is aided by the availability of numerous information sources. As a result, lots of new terms have emerged in the sustainability field, or old ones have been developed, but definitions and conceptual meanings haven't received sufficient analysis. Because the meanings of certain phrases are poor, identical or just differ slightly, the variety of definitions generates significant misunderstanding regarding their usage.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the concept design stage of a powertrain system can be improved by using a purely objective driven approach in selecting a final concept design to progress further. This research investigation will examine the development of a novel test-bed to assist in the selection of powertrain technologies during the concept design phase at Ford Motor Company Ltd, serving as the main contribution to knowledge.

The objectives of this research were achieved by carrying out a literature review of external published work related to concept design evaluation methods within product development and value engineering techniques. Empirical studies were conducted with a supporting case study used to test the application of a new test-bed to improve the concept design decision process.

A quantitative new tool “Product Optimisation Value Engineering” (PROVEN) is presented to critically assess new and evolving powertrain technologies at the concept design phase.

This research improves the concept design selection process, hence increasing the product value to the customer.

The new test-bed “PROVEN” incorporates a data-driven objective approach to assist in assessing concept design alternatives in providing the net value in terms of function and cost as perceived by the customer.

A mathematical new test-bed that incorporates a highly adaptable, data-driven and multi-attribute value approach to product specification and conceptual design is developed, novel to the automotive concept design process. This will create a substantially optimised product offering to the market, reducing overall development costs while achieving customer satisfaction. The new tool has the ability to define a technology value map to assess multiple technical options as a function of its attributes, whose precise values can be determined at a given cost.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the framework of conceptual design support tool (CDST) developed to assist designers during conceptual design process. The premise of the study is that, by combining human creativity with computer capabilities, it is possible to perform conceptual design process more efficiently than solely manual design. The study aims to show how conceptual design knowledge can be captured from experienced designers and kept in the computer system for later use and how the developed tool assists designers by handling some of the repetitive and time‐consuming tasks.

A conceptual design process model, which integrates systematic design approach with knowledge‐based system, is proposed. Based on this model, a CDST, which consists of function library, alternative concepts database, different modules for conceptual design activities, and a knowledge‐based system is developed. The alternative concepts database is built based on design reuse philosophy. Furthermore, the tool is designed to accept and save new concepts from the user through its knowledge acquisition module without modifying the source code. The CDST is developed using public domain open source programming environments namely CLIPS, Python, wxPython, and PyCLIPS.

Through its graphical user interface, CDST assists designers in performing the conceptual design process such as functional modelling, using standard vocabularies of functions, generating concepts and displaying on morphology chart, concept combination, and concept evaluation. The functionality and interaction between the user and the CDST is demonstrated with an example.

Currently, the alternative concepts database consists of concepts from subsea process equipment design and few general mechanical designs. The database can be enhanced by adding more concepts through the knowledge acquisition module provided.

The tool can be used as a knowledge management system in industry by capturing expertise knowledge and to train novice designers. It augments designer's knowledge by providing concepts from past designs.

The research output from this paper can be valuable resource in industry to support designers with computers. The research represents one of the attempts to develop domain independent conceptual design tool that can acquire new concepts throughout its lifetime.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that would help manufacturers to select the design concept that provides optimal solutions to the entire value chain involving multiple functional teams such as product design, development, planning, sourcing, service and marketing. The selection of an optimal design concept is based on the highest value index of a design concept. This is derived from quality function deployment (QFD) and a functional analysis system using customer requirement, quality deployment, development and design constraint as inputs. The framework systematically considers different alternatives to converge at an optimal solution.

All high-level product requirements from customer and market analysis are translated into different engineering parameters using QFD. Thereafter, the functional analysis system technique (FAST) is employed to determine the range of functions and identify components that would achieve different functionalities. The relative importance of each function is determined by functional cost analyses, enabling us to generate different design concepts. Thereafter, business parameters are extracted from the business objective of each functional area. These business parameters are compared with different design concepts using the analytical hierarchical process (AHP), thus evolving the enterprise value index (EVI) for each design concept.

The design concepts are evaluated with different business parameters using the AHP methodology to form EVI. The design concept 2 with highest enterprise EVI (4.549) is selected for further development. To validate the consistency of the business parameters, the consistency ratio (CR) has been calculated using Saaty’s Eigenvector method. The value of CR is 8.4 per cent, which indicates that the judgment made in this paper as far as populating the business parameters weight matrix is concerned is quite reasonable. This framework would enable an enterprise’s dealing in the area of complex engineering systems/aggregates to choose the design concept that would maximize the value of the enterprise.

This research develops an integrated methodology for design concept selection from an enterprise point of view. Major functional agencies and their respective attributes are considered for the development of the framework and subsequent selection. An enterprise’s mission and vision framework function as the primary input for the extraction of related attributes of the functional agency.

Concept design practices in engineering are not common across industry or academia. There are a number of well-known tools and methods acknowledged as useful in facilitating concept designing, that is, to assist idea generation, aid evaluation and final selection of one winning concept from many. Combinations of these popular concept design tools and methods provide various systematic methodologies by which practitioners propose to conduct or teach concept designing. In this paper, effective practices and trends are observed through the application of a specific concept design methodology over a range of different projects in electromechanical systems design.

The concept design methodology utilised in this study has been developed through the adoption of various tools and methods shown to be beneficial to concept designing, supported by previous positive experiences and successful utilisation associated with electromechanical systems research projects in academia. Each stage of the methodology is discussed and six case studies are presented, which are used to explore effective practices for concept designing.

Analysis of the case study data reveals the most popular criteria for the selection of concepts in electromechanical systems design, the number of selection criteria and number of initial concepts ideally required to converge on a final winning concept more efficiently, that is without the need for a more detailed second stage of selection using performance metrics.

Rarely are detailed studies undertaken in concept design, first, to address the justification for the concept design methodology adopted and, second, to show how effective practices emerge through the analysis of non-subjective data over a number of concept design projects. Although the paper uses only six case studies in electromechanical systems design, it is hoped that the approach presented promotes the possible future development of a framework for verification of concept design methodologies across different products, sectors and user groups.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to review, analyze and synthesize different pieces from literature to explore, define and describe the concept of social capital and its relationships with urban neighborhood design concepts. Additionally, to define the indicators and principles that can enhance social capital within urban design context. Moreover, to suggest theoretical urban neighborhood design concept that can adopt the changing discourse of social capital.

This research used the theoretical, analytical and descriptive approach-driven case study method. In all, 29 papers were analyzed to conclude the indicators that can measure social capital within the urban neighborhood design context and to conclude the required neighborhood design features and principles that influence social capital. Additionally, two new urban neighborhoods design concepts, cohousing and hybrid concepts that adopt new forms of social interaction, were studied, analyzed and then synthesized to suggest new neighborhood design concept, which is a heterotopia concept.

Heterotopia neighborhood concept aims to create real, different and heterogeneous functional spaces with different layers of meanings for people from different cultures in one place. Different visible enclosures are merged into spaces of otherness while the diversity gives a sense of entering another alternative place. The heterotopias neighborhood design principles aim to create a wide variety of forms, shapes and elements [different new spaces for different ritual activities to reflect the otherness self-reflection (homogeneous and scattered spaces)] and create linkage, hierarchy, contrast and mingling between spaces and places; well-defined functional effective spaces; different fantasy and leisure spaces; high standard quality of life and otherness space; flux in social realm and fluidity of spaces; mixed use and joint experience; and innovated technologies spaces to offer strange new temporalities.

This research recommended that different community stakeholders should participate in planning process, neighborhood urban design and decision-making process about public spaces to strengthen the community ties and achieve a heterotopia concept. Architect, urban designers and planners should adopt bottom-up design approach when designing neighborhood. Additionally, to avoid poor social capital research studies, the new researchers, practitioners and journal reviewers approaching social capital for the first time must read widely to gain an understanding of the concept from different perspectives and narrow their scope to their particular area of interest.

This research highlights the needs for empirical studies to examine the relationships/interrelationships between all neighborhood design principles and social capital. This might increase the knowledge on how we can design and increase the quality of neighborhood to foster social capital, which might offer interesting insights into how neighborhood urban design principles are combined to foster social capital within neighborhood context.

Neighborhood-based research encourages new suggesting concepts in designing every single place in the residential neighborhood in a way that can adapt the new forms of social interaction. This research scanned the current concepts of neighborhood design that concerned successfully with the changing forms of social relationships to conclude some design features and principles for neighborhood design to ensure and promote social public health and well-being. This research offers a unique perspective for better understanding the relationships between the neighborhood urban design as a spatial dimension and social capital. This research aims to enrich the socio-spatial knowledge and build a resilient urban community by suggesting theoretical urban neighborhood design concept, which is the heterotopia concept, and providing the urban designers and architects with a valuable thinking tool to design spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate undergraduate industrial design students’ perception of sustainable design concepts and how their conceptualization evolves as a function of their attendance to a specific sustainable design studio (SDS) course.

Two groups of students participated in the study. Students who did not attend to SDS were in the control group, whereas students who attended SDS were in the experimental group. In total, 22 concepts, which have been highlighted in literature and the SDS course, were selected as keywords. Participants were asked to provide relatedness scores of these keywords before and after they attended the course. The data were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and pathfinder (PF) networks.

Results indicate that the SDS caused a change in the conceptualization of sustainable design concepts parallel to the course outcomes and the literature. Some concepts were highlighted as conveyors that guide students to conceptualize sustainable development and design.

This study is considered a case study focusing on declarative knowledge, and owing to the low number of participants, the results should be carefully interpreted.

The findings may support design educators to enhance their courses and promote deeper debates on teaching sustainable design.

Two specific dimensions were found from the analysis of multidimensional scaling, and several conveyor concepts were identified from PF networks. Allocating proposed dimensions and concepts into a course may have the potentials to enhance students’ perception of sustainability concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to present a decisions support tool that can be applied in initial stages of design, for evaluating the investment feasibility of changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing design concepts, based on future demand predictions and their uncertainties. A quantitative model is proposed, which evaluates the discounted value of capital and operating costs of changeable manufacturing design concepts, based on essential characteristics regarding their type and extent of changeability.

Quantitative empirical modeling is applied, where model conceptualization, validation, and implementation are central elements, using two Danish manufacturing companies as cases.

The applicability of the model is demonstrated in the two case companies, highlighting differences in type, extent, and level of feasible changeability, as a result of differences in product and production characteristics.

Further studies of changeability implementation should be conducted across industrial fields in order to generalize findings.

There is currently limited support for the conceptual design phase of changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing, where critical decisions regarding type, extent, and level of changeability must be made, regardless of high degrees of uncertainty about future demand scenarios.

This paper expands previous research on design for changeability and reconfigurability, by explicitly considering changeability as a capability that can be enabled in various ways for various purposes in different industrial contexts. The proposed model and the case implementations provide important knowledge on the transition toward changeability in industry.