Design, Production and Service Seminars

Please feel free to invite speakers and come with ideas. We  hope to see you, and are looking forward to your suggestions on format, topics, and invitations.

Per Langaa Jensen, Anja Maier and Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen,

Seminars

Tuesday, 7 February	11.00-12.00		Building 426, room 145
Product Data / Life-cycle Management
Antti Pulkkinen (Associate Professor, University of Tampere)
Antti will discuss some key definitions and take us through some of his findings from industrial practices / global companies in Finland.

Tuesday, 7 February	13.00-14.00		Building 426, room 145
Traceability of engineering information – issues and solutions
Mario Storga (Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb)
The engineering information has a central role in product development: it describes and documents the constitution and behaviour of the product; it drives the product development process and is the object of verification and validation procedures. With the current emphasis being on companies to supply products and provide support services throughout the product lifetime, the realisation is that the engineering information being lost can aid in both the product life cycle support and also the development of new products. The project objective was to establish a framework for traceability of engineering information evolution within the new and evolving paradigm of the long and total product-service life cycle.

Tuesday, 14 February	11.00-12.00		Building 424, room 107
Understanding complex systems
Maik Maurer (Assistant Professor, Technische Universität München)
Visualizing, analyzing and optimizing structures Large systems with many components and many dependencies impede safe acting and decision making. When searching for solutions, often "the answer is not so simple” and “the problem is too complex." Then a typical strategy is to decide with intuition and to hope for a lucky hand. Structural complexity considers system dependencies in order to meet the challenges of complexity in product design. Dependencies exist in any system and they form significant structures, e.g. clusters or feedback loops. On the one hand, dealing with system structures is a natural competence. For example, we indicate elements with specific behavior as bottle necks or core elements in the daily life. On the other hand, system complexity results from the amount of dependencies, because small system changes may propagate and lead to unforeseeable and enormous impacts. Structural complexity management identifies structural characteristics in a system. Knowing these characteristics allows predicting a general system behavior. And based on an identified behavior, system optimization can be initiated, i.e. a system’s structural characteristics can be improved. The presentation will cover insights to the management of structural complexity in different fields of engineering. And possibilities for improved control instead of simple reduction of complexity are presented.

Tuersday 27. March	11.00-12.00		Building 424, room 107
What is needed within production research
Knud Sant, Chairman for the board of Valcon a/s
Knud Sant has a PhD degree from the former Department of Operations Management (Driftsteknisk Institut). He has a long carrier as consultant in operations management and has been a co-founder of more important companies delivering consultancy within operations management and other management fields.   We agreed with Knud Sant that in his presentation he should not argue for the need of production research but highlight the different issues within the field where research can contribute. He has also been encouraged to give some indications of the type of research needed.

Tuesday, 17 April	11.00-12.00		Building 424, room 107
From Attitude to Action - The Development of the Cambridge Sustainable Design Tool Kit
Bernhard Dusch, (Research Associate, University of Cambridge)
It is well accepted that design is one of the key aspects of new product development. Further, it is widely recognised that design also plays a central role in the development of more sustainable products. However, although the idea of sustainability seems to be widely discussed in design research, there are signs that the true meaning of this notion has not been fully assimilated in new product development to date. This talk presents an ongoing research project which aims to better understand how the concept of sustainable design can be more effectively integrated in design practice. A central part of this project is the development of a sustainable design tool kit, which not only provides sustainable design guidance on a practical level, but also communicates fundamental concepts of sustainable design in an accessible, intuitive and entertaining way. The tool kit is tested in a series of workshops in design academia and industry and improved iteratively throughout this process. The project is carried out in the Design Management Group in the Institute for Manufacturing.

May 15th.	11.00-12.00		Building 426 Room 145
Creativity and Biologically Inspired Design (BID): Research at IdeasLab IISc
Prof . Amaresh Chakrabarti (Professor, Director of Centre for Product Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science)
Amaresh is a guest prof. at DTU Management for May and June and a former colleague of Saeema and Anja from the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre. He is currently leader of the IDeasLab at IISc and program chair for the ICord DEsign conference.   Biological systems can be a rich and abundant source for engineering designs. Systematic support for BID has been a relatively new research area that focuses on understanding BID and support BID in a systematic manner. The talk will present work on understanding design creativity, and results from understanding designing and supporting BID using various guidelines and a tool called Idea-Inspire that has a database of 1000+ biological and technical systems that are searched using analogical search algorithms to provide apprpriate systems as stimuli for ideation.

June 6th	11.00-12.00		Building 426 Room 145
Perceived creativity and beauty in design objects
Bo T. Christensen is associate professor at Copenhagen Business School. He studies creativity from a cognitive psychological perspective, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. He publishes on both the characteristics of design processes;  individual differences in kinds and levels of creativity; and on the perception of creative objects. The latter area is the focus of this talk.   When consumers and users make judgments about whether they perceive design objects to be beautiful and creative, they rely in part in their own visual processing experience in making those judgments. A design object that is easily perceived (e.g., which has a high degree of contrast, is relatively low in complexity, and with which the perceiver has prior perceptual experience) will be perceived to be more beautiful. It has been argued in the Perceptual Fluency theories that this ease-of-perception has a positive hedonic tone, that is, ease-of-perception is always good.  However, this is challenged by recent findings suggesting that design objects that are difficult to perceive actually in some cases are evaluated to be  more creative (i.e., a positive outcome). In this talk I will talk about recent experiments I have conducted on the perception of beauty and creativity in design objects.