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The main purpose of this research is to understand the priorities of designers for an ecodesign support, while developing environmentally sustainable products. Also, this study identifies the requirements of the designers for managing the environmental quality of products.

This research is conducted in two phases of survey. In the first phase, various requirements of designers are collected, refined and segregated under certain well defined characteristics of the ecodesign support. In second phase, the designers are asked to rank each characteristic of the ecodesign support in a questionnaire. The responses obtained from the designers are analyzed separately for engineering designers and design researchers by using Henry Garrett ranking technique to identify the priorities of designers for an ecodesign support.

Results show that there is a contrast between the perspective of engineering designers and design researchers, and their priorities for an ecodesign support are opposite to each other. Thus it can be understood that the features which are added by design researchers in ecodesign support may not be adequate for engineering designers to manage the environmental quality of products.

The designers play a key role in the development of environmentally benign products through the use of different ecodesign supports (i.e. tools or methods). Therefore, it is important to understand the desired characteristics of the ecodesign support from designer's perspective. Also, the priorities of designers from academia (design researchers) and industry (engineering designers) must be understood because they are the two stakeholders indulged in the development and usage of various ecodesign supports for environmentally conscious product development (ECPD).

Knowledge contribution loafing as one of the major obstacles to knowledge sharing among designers in engineering design firms impedes better achievement of engineering design. The purpose of this paper is to examine different types of ethical climate impacts on knowledge contribution loafing among designers through the mediating effect of knowledge leadership.

By adopting a quantitative research design, data were collected using a survey questionnaire from 352 designers in engineering design firms. The data were analyzed using the partial-least squares structural equation modeling approach to test hypotheses.

Ethical climate is an important factor to affect knowledge contribution loafing among designers, and three types of ethical climate (self-interest, social responsibility and law/professional codes) have different degrees of influence on knowledge contribution loafing. In addition, knowledge leadership can alleviate knowledge contribution loafing, and it is a mediator between ethical climate and knowledge contribution loafing.

Engineering design firms should cultivate and strengthen the role of social responsibility, law/professional codes and knowledge leadership and reduce the influence of self-interest to mitigate the negative of knowledge contribution loafing among designers.

By identifying ethical climate as a novel influence factor for knowledge contribution loafing, this research further highlights the role of different types of ethical climate in an engineering design context. Moreover, it delves deeply into the issue around different types of ethical climate affect knowledge contribution loafing among designers through the role of knowledge leadership. This broadens the understanding of how ethical climate affects knowledge contribution loafing among designers in the engineering design organizations and enriches knowledge management literatures in engineering design industry.

This paper aims to examine how ethical leadership alleviates knowledge contribution loafing among engineering designers through the mediating effect of knowledge-based psychological ownership and the moderating effect of emotion regulation strategies.

This study adopts a questionnaire survey to obtain 344 valid sample from engineering designers and uses partial least squares-structural equation modeling to analyze data.

The results demonstrate that ethical leadership is a key factor to alleviate knowledge contribution loafing. Knowledge-based psychological ownership is a main factor causing knowledge contribution loafing and mediates the influence of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing. Furthermore, cognitive reappraisal (a response-focused emotion regulation strategy) moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge contribution loafing, and the effect of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing is stronger when cognitive reappraisal is high.

Engineering design organizations may inspire ethical leadership and pay attention to psychological state of designers. Leaders may help designers overcome knowledge-based psychological ownership by the influence of ethical leadership. During the process of knowledge interaction, designers may adopt cognitive reappraisal strategy consciously.

This study addresses the knowledge gap that ethical leadership affects knowledge contribution loafing with knowledge-based psychological ownership as the intermediary. This study also advances the literature on leadership and emotion regulation and extends the scope of social learning theory in knowledge management domain through examining the moderate role of emotion regulation strategies.

Engineer-to-order (ETO) supply chains involve multiple companies for performing complex projects. The ability to effectively coordinate cross-business activities is essential to avoid delays, cost overruns and quality problems. Coordination is related to a number of contingent factors that need to be better comprehended. The purpose of this paper is to highlight such contingent factors and to analyse their effect on the occurrence of project delays.

A multiple case study is used to investigate the moderating factors affecting coordination in projects carried out in an ETO supply chain. Such factors are examined through a cross-analysis of six shipbuilding projects based on data from interviews, project documentation and clips from the media press.

In ETO supply chains, the engineering and production activities involve mutual interdependences that need to be coordinated. The findings suggest that both the integration of engineering and production and the production capability are the most critical factors influencing coordination in an ETO supply chain.

The study was carried out within shipbuilding projects as a setting to represent the ETO domain. To extend the findings, further research can examine other types of projects, such as: oil and gas, construction, military and aerospace.

In practice, there is no “one-fits-all” solution for coordination. Each project represents a unique context which has specific objectives, actors and constraints. From that perspective, this study provides a basis to comprehend coordination in a complex setting.

This study builds knowledge upon coordination by generating a number of propositions regarding the effectiveness of coordination on avoiding delays in complex projects carried out in ETO supply chains. Focusing on the engineering and production activities, the authors extend the existing theory by demonstrating that coordination can vary according to the level of several moderating factors.

Investigates the feedback to product designers of engineering and production costs in five industrial equipment firms. Reports that, despite the ubiquity of cost as an important design criterion, and the role that feedback should play in both individual and organizational learning, there were several significant problems: (1) Cost feedback was given as the difference between outcome and estimate in order to remove the effect of external factors, but this feedback then confounded the performance of estimation and design activities. (2) Distributional information in historical cost feedback was usually overlooked. The result was an excessive attention to detailed planning, consistent under‐estimation, and persistently negative feedback. (3) Designers and supervisors disagreed about the predictability of costs. Supervisors drew stronger inferences from feedback because they believed particular outcomes were more representative. (4) Engineering cost outcomes had poor reliability owing to the incentives to smooth cost discrepancies over different elements of the design; as a result it was unclear which were the problematic elements and opportunities were lost for calibrating the estimating process. This calibration also suffered from cost measurements being made at a higher level of aggregation than cost estimates. (5) The considerable delays between making design decisions and observing cost outcomes made it hard to learn cost‐effective design strategies through experience. There were instances where designers simply never found out how much it cost to engineer and produce their designs.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how designers and engineers practice design while Making. Motivated by their roots in constructionist learning principles, Makerspaces are increasingly used as sites to learn design, especially in undergraduate engineering education programs. However, there has been little work on how trained designers Make and how design emerges in their Maker practices.

In this paper, a conceptual framework is constructed to identify design practices within Making informed by theories of human-centered design and designerly ways of knowing. The framework is used to analyze narratives of ten experienced designers and Makers to understand how they enact design while they Make.

The rich and compelling narratives of the participants support the proposed conceptual framework, providing qualitative evidence for how designers practice and know design while Making. This study also reports on a strong theme of realizing purpose and personal meaning while Making across the participants’ narratives that sheds light on the unique and educationally meaningful value of Making, as in Making being a venue for agentive constructivist learning.

As an educationally meaningful practice, Making can be explored from several lenses, and this research solely uses a design lens.

The motivations of the study are twofold. First, to understand how designers practice human-centered design and use design knowledge while Making. Second, to support the epistemological legitimacy of Maker knowledge by establishing connections with design knowledge.

This paper contributes to the limited body of scholarly work to conceptualize experienced designers’ Maker practices. Work in this area can inform learning outcomes and performance expectations in educational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an ethnographic analysis of the infrastructure intervention process in rural, non-industrialized countries, providing justification for a new approach to technical design. The new approach, Contextual Engineering, merges engineering with sociology to identify place-based conditions that may influence adoption of technological interventions.

A survey of international engineering practitioners, combined with the author's personal journals from 18 international project experiences are qualitatively analyzed using nVivo software to develop a stronger understanding of what motivates stakeholders to undertake humanitarian engineering work, how they incorporate place-based conditions and how their decision-making affects intervention outcomes.

Critical findings include the need for practitioner self-reflection to recognize motivations and beliefs; recognition that industrialized-world technology may not function effectively if it doesn’t acknowledge the client’s societal standards; identification of local context to determine practices, knowledge and beliefs that reside uniquely within the client community; resistance to application of practitioner standards that may not correspond with client conditions, understandings and needs; analysis of power dynamics within the client community, between client and neighboring communities, and among project stakeholders; and incorporation of innovative self-sufficiency in technical infrastructure design.

This paper follows upon previous published research by the author regarding the origin and application of her new approach to rural international infrastructure design, Contextual Engineering, and uses ethnographic qualitative analysis to identify key conditions that justify the Contextual Engineering discipline to more effectively serve rural clients from alternately developed societies.

This article is about what has been described as the aristocracy of the engineering profession: design engineers. I hope, before I continue, that I have no readers for whom the term engineer has connotations of greasy spanners. The professional design engineer is a highly technically qualified, literate, numerate and creative individual, as will emerge from what follows. Spanners do not enter into it, greasy or otherwise.

This chapter analyzes and considers the relationship between original new product development processes and holistic leadership at Great Britain’s Dyson. An innovative aspect regarding staff structure in the Dyson organization, unlike many development manufacturers, is the absence of differentiation between designers and engineers. All employees are “engineers,” and all employees at all times are engaged in some sort of initiative in technology or experimentation. At Dyson there are product developers known as “designer engineers” who are responsible not only for technology, but also for design and development as they closely link function with design. All designers and engineers are involved in all processes from product concept planning and development until the final testing. In other words, unlike at many development companies, almost no knowledge boundaries exist between different specialist areas at Dyson.

Realization of such business processes at Dyson is achieved by practitioners at every management level including James Dyson (former CEO). Aiming for a single development goal, practitioners form business communities which originate with the formation of multilayered “Ba” that crisscross the company, irrespective of formal or informal organization, through holistic leadership. Through the formation of business communities, practitioners achieve strategic collaboration, which is the starting point of the company’s product development concepts.

The purpose of this study is to theoretically link design thinking with behavioural strategy, using empirical results that relate three cognitive dimensions: design thinking personality traits, cognitive passive resistance and linear thinking, and, consequently, determine: if there is a negative relationship between design thinking traits and cognitive passive resistance and if this relationship is mediated by linear thinking.

This study used a quantitative methodology of covariance-based structural equation modelling. The data were collected from a three-scale, self-completed questionnaire, which was constructed using the existing modelling of the academic literature. The questionnaire was validated by confirmatory factor analysis and applied to a sample of 342 professional engineering and business graduates in Colombia.

The results of the structural equation modelling demonstrate a negative relationship between design thinking traits and cognitive passive resistance, and this relationship is mediated by linear thinking. These findings link design thinking and behavioural strategy and build new foundations for future studies, providing further theoretical support to the academic literature’s discussion of the relationship between design thinking and theories of managerial practices and innovation management.

The main limitation of this study is the subjectivity of the answers because of potential bias from the respondents in completing the questionnaire. Another limitation is that the research was conducted only in the context of Colombia, so it is recommended that other studies be carried to generalise the results. This study has several theoretical implications. This study contributes to existing research on design thinking, evidencing a promising field of study to support it theoretically, such as the behavioural strategy. This study also contributes to the literature on innovation management deepening into a field of study that has received less attention in the literature, such as passive cognitive resistance to innovation. Likewise, this study presents a theoretical contribution to the dual process of cognition, proposing a new dimension to the construction of the multidimensional concept of nonlinear thinking. This study also contributes to the behavioural strategy field, evidencing a growing area of application in strategic management, such as design thinking. Finally, this research also proposes the development of a new research avenue about the concept of knowledge hiding as a possible source of innovation resistance.

This research also has implications for business and engineering education and practice. This study’s results suggest that before implementing an organisational initiative such as design thinking, which seeks to change people's behaviour, it is necessary to approach it as a cognitive process and develop strategies to mitigate passive cognitive resistance to change. This research’s results also present implications for business and engineering education, evidencing the need to include other perspectives of thinking that allow non-designers to develop creative thinking.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative study on design thinking as a business management concept using linear thinking of non-designers to relate design thinking traits with cognitive passive resistance. This research provides theoretical and empirical support for framing design thinking within the field of behavioural strategy.