Competition among companies that produce complex or large product portfolios has created a need to use modularity strategies not only to flexibly manage technical complexity in a cost-effective manner but also to produce visually appealing products. This research aims to understand how the visual appearance of products is affected by modular product development strategies and creates coherent product brands. Thus, this study examines the intersection of design aesthetics, product portfolio management, product brand management, and design management. Specifically, this study aims to understand how such strategies constrain and generate possibilities when the industrial design process concerns itself with visual appearance. 

The main research approach has been qualitative multi-case methodology (Miles et al, 2014; Eisenhardt, 1989) and design theory building (Chakrabarti and Blessing, 2016) that collects data through interviews, experimentation, and theoretical studies based on findings in the literature. Sixteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with design vice presidents, senior designers, and senior design engineers at five Swedish manufacturers from the automotive, MedTech, consumer goods, commercial vehicles, and materials handling industries. 

This approach has resulted in the description of three theoretical models and a design method, product gist, for investigating prototypicality in a product category. Aesthetic flexibility reflects the requirement that under certain circumstances an industrial designer has to plan for future (as yet unknown) changes in a design. 

Each of the three theoretical models has a different focus: one model describes three ways manufacturing companies organise a strategic in-house design function; one model describes how design decisions are made on a general level through an intuitive and knowledge-based judgment process; and one model describes the strategies a manager needs to consider when developing an existing product portfolio and how the strategies influence industrial design practice. 

Understanding visual flexibility serves as a starting point for further investigations of how development strategies affect visual product design. This understanding provides industrial designers insight into how they can develop product systems that share design components across product lines to promote brand identity. The findings of this work illustrate and explain a complex and multi-facetted design phenomenon that many designers manage more or less intuitively today; therefore, this study advances the understanding of the field for academics, teachers, and professional designers. 

The continuous management of a manufacturing company's product portfolio is a key aspect ofsuccessful product development. Managers determine when and which products should be updated orterminated. This process influences inhouse Industrial design teams, thus prompting a range ofdevelopment strategies they might deploy. In product portfolio management there is a tension betweenstandardisation and customisation. From a marketing perspective this is may be addressed through brandDNA, from engineering through modularization. The design perspective (merging those two) has beenill-explored, particularly from professional designers. Previously we proposed a theoretical modeldescribing different industrial design projects and how they influence industrial designers strategicthinking. It was developed through literature reviews and examples found in manufacturing industry.Through a multi-case interview study with 16 participants from five manufacturing companies withstrong brands, this article aims to empirically evaluate the proposed model. The results show that therespondents could describe all but one industrial design projects, the cause maybe that they had not beenexposed to saving a company by doing a total makeover.

To achieve progression in a product portfolio, companies employ industrial designers to aid in the development and creation of new products. Researchers have shown that industrial designers play a consolidating role at both strategic and operational management levels due to the need to incorporate requirements from several company functions, such as brand, research and development, production, economics and senior management. This article investigates how to expand the ways in which a product portfolio may be extended and updated, from an industrial design perspective. Seven product portfolio development strategies were identified. Inspired by studies of competitor's influence on an existing portfolio, a theoretical descriptive model was developed: the Industrial Design Product Portfolio Management model, which positions the suggested product portfolio development strategies in relation to existing and competing products. The findings may advance our current understanding of existing product portfolio management strategies and the connection between management and product design. Thus, it could be a useful framework for academics, teachers and professionals. 

Industrial designers make decisions in a different way than other professions. This creates a discrepancy in cross-functional development projects which impacts both the organisation and how strategic decisions are made in a company. A multi-case study was conducted to investigate how design functions in five mature Swedish manufacturing companies were organised and how they made design decisions. Sixteen senior design mangers, chief designers, and senior studio engineers were interviewed. The research found that design teams could be organised in three separate ways depending on the level of strategic involvement in the company and how many were assigned to the team. The respondents described a dual decision process where proposals are judged in a continuum between two intuitive measures, ’Wow’ and ’Shame’, and a compromise phase with input from other company functions. The results can aid senior management in their understanding of strategic design functions and further the academic design decision discourse. 

The increase in competition amongst companies that produce complex or large product portfolios has created a need to utilise modularity strategies not only to flexibly manage technical complexity in a costeffective manner but also for visual appearance. This research aims to understand how the visual appearance of products is affected by modular product development strategies. Specifically, the aim is to understand how such strategies induce constraints and generate possibilities for management of visual appearance in the design process.

Five studies have been conducted during the course of this licentiate thesis. Two were conducted with professionals and students in design, while the remaining three are theoretical studies based on findings in the literature, theory building, and experimental research. The goal has been to investigate how designers work when they are put to the task of changing and developing the designs of complex products that are part of a portfolio. The challenge has been to study what suitable strategies exist that manage complex products and product brands, then investigate how these influence designers’ practices.

The first study examined how coherence towards a product category influences the design of new products. The outcome of the study was a method to explore visual coherence and diversity in the appearance of a product category.

The remaining four studies investigated how modularity, brand management and the redesign of product portfolios influence a design process. The second study described a design phenomenon known as aesthetic flexibility, which was further explored in studies three and five. The outcome from these studies was a proposal for four aesthetic flexibility strategies.

The fourth study investigated in what way portfolio extension strategies found in brand management and design research are related, and how such strategies influence aesthetic flexibility. The results from study four were illustrated as a model.

The main contribution of this work is the phenomenon of ‘aesthetic flexibility’, which helps understand the factors that influence designers when working with branded modular products. Understanding visual flexibility serves as a starting point in further investigations of how different development strategies affect the possibilities for visual product design.

The findings of this work serve to illustrate and explain a complex and multi-facetted design phenomenon which many designers manage more or less intuitively today, thus advancing academics’, teachers’ and professional designers’ understanding of the field.

This paper will investigate the strategic design decision-making of an in-house designer in a company with a large product portfolio, with respect to how designers plan for future visual alterations of the product. In-house designers have to think strategically about the creation of recognition and differentiation through design because they influence the company’s overall strategies. Therefore, while balancing aesthetic and semiotic qualities of the product, designers have to consider current as well as future needs for recognition and product differentiation. The ability to do so is affected by cost and brand positioning strategy. An exploratory study was setup to investigate what design strategies could be found in an industrial design team employed by a company. The study exposed how in-house designers could strategically incorporate aesthetic flexibility in product parts in order to create opportunities for faster facelifts or redesigns. The importance of managing carry-over details in larger product portfolios was also discovered. To carry over parts from different products is an important way for a company to save money, development time and at the same time increase brand recognition through repetition. Carry-over can be an aid to enhance visual recognition, but it can also be a hindrance when the designer needs to create differencing design values. Most products have a lifespan before they need to be updated or redesigned, which depends on the competition in a product segment. This makes it extra important for designers to have an understanding of when to incorporate carry-over details and when not to. A model was created to describe how carry-over details, design cues and aesthetic flexibility could be managed in a product portfolio. The model is based on Rune Monö’s works and brand management literature, with an emphasis on the brand positioning framework of Point of Difference, Point of Parity and brand extension by Keller et al.

Multidisciplinary frameworks are needed to develop products that fit the human. Ergonomics is a multifaceted field that encompasses physical, cognitive and organizational aspects, and it is therefore a suitable subject to be taught to design engineering students.

The objective of this paper was to describe and reflect upon how a systems perspective on Ergonomics is developed and conveyed in a course in Product Ergonomics to engineering students at the Design and Product Development (DPD) programme at Linköping University, Sweden. The paper is based on the authors’ experiences from teaching the course in Product Ergonomicsas well ason 52 students’ written reflections about their view on Ergonomics before and after taking the course.

Means and ideas for teaching Ergonomics with a systems perspective included organizing a theoretical introduction into weekly themes and thereafter integrating and applying these themes in a product concept project under supervision of a multidisciplinary teacher team.

The paper also reflects on how the systems perspective of Ergonomics is planned for and realized in the intended, implemented and attained curriculum.

Practitioner Summary: Ergonomics is a multidisciplinary field which is suitable for product development but also may be difficult to grasp. This paper describes and reflects upon how Ergonomics was taught to facilitate the development of a systems view on Ergonomics for engineering students at Linköping University, Sweden.

Means for achieving this were to: organize the course in weekly themes in which different knowledge areas within Ergonomics were elaborated, integrate these knowledge areas in a product concept project, and have a multidisciplinary teacher team.

One fundamental challenge in choosing an examination form to assess student achievements is to find an examination which, both encourages students to continuously elaborate the course content and constitutes a learning process itself. The objective of this paper is to share and reflect on the development and implementation of a new theme-based examination in a six credit course in Product Ergonomics given in the engineering programme Design and Product Development at Linköping University, Sweden. The course runs during four months and has two parts: one theoretical and one applied. The former focuses on theoretical ergonomic topics, models and methods while the latter is a project aiming at consolidating the students’ understanding of the theory by implementing the knowledge in a product development case. To encourage the students to adapt a deep learning approach, the traditional written mid-term exam for the theoretical part was abandoned and another concept developed. In the new concept, the theoretical part was split onto six weekly themes. Each theme was introduced at the beginning of the week by high-lighting main theories and models followed by a group-work assignment to be elaborated on by the students during the week. The theme was examined at the end of the week through a short written exam and a seminar to discuss and reflect upon the theme. From a student perspective, the positive outcome of the theme-based examination was peer learning and a more active learning style. The students appreciated the theme-based structure of the course. Occasionally, some students commented that weekly examinations could be perceived as stressful. The teachers perceived the students to be more acquainted with ergonomics theory and methods which increased the quality of the course project. The reported theme-based assessment is one example of implementing among others the CDIO syllabus parts 2.2 and 3.1and CDIO standards 8 and 11.

In today's competitive market it is essential for companies to have a clear brand identity towards it consumers and users in order to be successful. Consumers have often a variety of products to choose from and the challenge for a company's products is to be discovered and remembered. An important factor is recognition of a product and how it is conceived through our perception which is mainly an identification process based on familiarity, resemblance or similarity. Furthermore, the visual part of the brain organizes the surrounding into patterns which are used as a guide for us, and to capture the surrounding is called getting its gist. The process of finding resemblance in a design space is often done by the designer as an implicit part in the design process. If this implicit knowledge could be more objectively visualised it might be a helpful tool to create a visual baseline of how consumers would experience the product segment. To show similarities and differences of design features quantitatively can facilitate the communication in a design development project. This paper explores how the concept of a product gist may be used to create a conceptual product sign and also how it could be used to analyse what the design space looks like in a given product segment. By quantitatively overlaying transparent pictures in a product segment visual pattern emerges that can be used as a communication tool in a design process when discussing brand recognition. In this paper a power drill is used as a simple application to illustrate the usage of the proposed product gist.

This paper describes a workflow for designing experiences whileinteracting with an advanced driver assistant system. Future driver assistancesystems that utilize sensors and Car2X-communication in order to detect threatsin the car environment can help the driver to avoid collisions. To increase theacceptance of such a system, the interaction between the driver and the systemshould be able to generate positive experiences. To generate those experiences,a story-based design workflow was used. Concepts created with this workflowshould be able to address specific psychological needs of the driver. Theimplementation of this workflow revealed different schemes of positiveexperiences during driver interaction in critical situations.