Carlye Lauff

University of Minnesota | UMN · Product Design

This special issue features articles that review the changing role of design artifacts in design practice, covering topics including generative AI, digital design tools, and cloud-based collaborative platforms.

We are on a design journey. Business, education, society, and community are at the center of this journey. In the words of the Prime Minister of Singapore, ‘Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural, or happened by itself... Now, as a first world country, design thinking will be critical for us to transform Singapore again,...

Testing prototypes with intended end users is critical to the design process. There is limited research on testing prototypes with certain types of end users, specifically children for toy products. Additionally, prototypes evolve in fidelity throughout a project, adding to the complexity in developing best practices for prototype testing. This pap...

Failure is part of the design process, and yet there is limited knowledge around how product design students perceive failure in their work. This pilot study aims to understand how a small sample size of undergraduate product design students conceptualize success and failure during specific stages of their design projects. This study uses a two-ste...

Communication with external audiences is a critical task within the design process. Yet, we lack fundamental knowledge about how designers communicate design solutions and decisions to such audiences. This is particularly problematic for novice designers, as without such knowledge, we cannot develop pedagogical interventions to train novices as eff...

Prototypes are critical design artifacts, and recent studies have established the ability of prototypes to facilitate communication. However, prior work suggests that novice designers often fail to perceive prototypes as effective communication tools, and struggle to rationalize design decisions made during prototyping tasks. To understand the inte...

The Design Innovation Methodology Handbook represents a contribution to our design journey. This handbook was developed by a number of contributors from the United States and Singapore. Through a co-creation effort and common interests to innovate together, the intent is to make a difference for all persons in our communities and society. Readers a...

The Design Innovation Methodology Handbook represents a contribution to our design journey. This handbook was developed by a number of contributors from the United States and Singapore. Through a co-creation effort and common interests to innovate together, the intent is to make a difference for all persons in our communities and society. Readers a...

The Design Innovation Methodology Handbook represents a contribution to our design journey. This handbook was developed by a number of contributors from the United States and Singapore. Through a co-creation effort and common interests to innovate together, the intent is to make a difference for all persons in our communities and society. Readers a...

Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to play an important role in product development. Often, AM is integrated into later stages of the design process for products during detailed design, manufacturing, and production. There is an opportunity to introduce AM during early-stage design, which could inspire new business models and services in additio...

In the current fast-paced and global context of design within organizations and enterprises, there is significant interest in integrating design approaches and methodologies across fields and industry sectors. Such an integration will provide a synthesis of design intent across user and stakeholder desirability, viability, feasibility, sustainabili...

Prototypes are complex and dynamic artifacts that shape social situations during product development. A ten-month applied ethnographic study of a footwear company recounts prototypes' evolving role in communication between three stakeholder groups. In this case study, we use Mol's “bodies multiple” theory to describe prototypes enactment as communi...

Fiber-reinforcement of structures built with additive manufacturing (AM) has been the focus of many recent innovations in the AM space. These innovations have further enabled AM's progress from a prototyping technology to a viable manufacturing process for end use parts under normal load conditions. This paper introduces a set of design principles...

Additive manufacturing (AM) has matured rapidly in the past decade and has made significant progress towards a reliable and repeatable manufacturing process. The technology opens the doors for new types of innovation in engineering product development. However, there exists a need for a design process framework to efficiently and effectively explor...

Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to play an important role in product development, and many companies are searching for how to best integrate AM into their products, business models, and design processes. Often, AM is integrated into later stages of the design process for products during manufacturing and production. However, there is an oppor...

While prototypes are critical to the creation of successful products and innovative solutions, building a prototype is characterized by large sunk costs and a plethora of unknowns. The versatility and effectiveness of prototypes paired with the ambiguous nature of developing a prototype can lead to wasted resources. Recent studies support this clai...

Welcome to Design Innovation (DI) Learning Modules!... The DI Learning Modules cover a key subset of the Design Methods that we practice in SUTD-MIT IDC, guiding learners on how to execute them. They are categorized according to the Design Process Phases (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver) and support our Design Method Cards

Companies need to employ new design methods and tools to remain competitive in today's global economy. Design methods are used to help teams move through the different stages of the design process, such as during project scoping, concept generation, and concept selection. Concept generation design methods are meant to help teams generate diverse, n...

Prototyping is an essential part of product development in companies, and yet it is one of the least explored areas of design practice. There are limited ethnographic studies conducted within companies, specifically around the topic of prototyping. This is an empirical and industrial-based study using inductive ethnographic observations to further...

Design has been called one of the defining characteristics of engineering, and it has been long-argued that design is equally social and technical in practice. The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a research tradition of exploring the interwoven social aspects of technical fields like engineering design. We borrow a concept from ST...

Just as design is a fundamental part of engineering work, prototyping is an essential part of the design process. For many engineering design courses, students must develop a final prototype as part of the course requirements. And in industry, engineers build multiple prototypes when creating a product for market. Although prototyping is core to de...

This paper explores the nature of prototypes from three diverse companies in the fields of consumer electronics, footwear, and medical devices. It is part of a larger qualitative research study developing a prototyping framework grounded in the emergent findings from practice and detailed inductive inquiry. In this paper, we describe the methods fo...

This paper describes the design of an interactive artifact--The SEL Transition Wheel-created to support social-emotional learning (SEL) in children ages three to six. The SEL Transition Wheel focuses on helping young children learn emotional self-regulation and labeling of one's emotions while encouraging caregiver mediation of the SEL process duri...

This paper explores the development of social emotional learning (SEL) solutions created by two design teams. Both teams combined methods from design thinking, empathetic design, rapid prototyping, and evidence-based prevention to answer the complex question: How might we support social and emotional development in young children (ages 3-6)? The tw...

The proportion of female-headed households is rising dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa, making women's income generating activities an increasingly important area of study. As women transition into the role of head-of-household, their traditional activities are augmented with the responsibility of being the breadwinner, and their successes become...

Design is widely considered to be the central or distinguishing activity of engineering and yet it remains an insufficiently researched and understood topic. From the perspective of engineering education, where a 'disconnect' between professional engineering practices and university-based practices is an oft-discussed limitation, the sparseness of...

Origami engineering – the use of origami principles in engineering applications – provides numerous opportunities to revolutionize the way we design, manufacture, assemble, and package products and devices. By combining origami principles with active materials, we can create reconfigurable products and devices that can fold and unfold on demand. In...

This is an empirical ethnographic study of how engineers in both undergraduate design courses and the professional workplace engage in engineering design. The findings suggest that the organizational contexts constitute processes of design differently, in ways that challenge the typical rhetoric of undergraduate education that project courses are i...

This exploratory, ethnographic study compares engineering design in different organizational settings, as a way of examining the nature of claimed disconnects between professional engineering design practices and those taking place in the undergraduate engineering curriculum. The focus in this research is on three different design contexts. Two are...

The use of origami principles to create 3-dimensional shapes has the potential to revolutionize active material structures and compliant mechanisms. Active origami structures can be applied to a broad range of areas such as reconfigurable aircraft and deployable space structures as well as instruments for minimally invasive surgery. Our curren...