Stanko Škec

University of Zagreb Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture · CADLab

The proliferation of high-immersion technologies might change the way virtual prototypes are used in the design process. This paper investigates the effect of immersion on reviews – critical design situations where many decisions are made. More specifically, the paper analyses the effect of immersion on spatial (intrinsic or extrinsic) and design s...

A way of presenting information in visual representations of technical systems influences the progress and the outcome of the engineering design process. Consequently, improving the means by and through which information is utilised during the process is one suggested approach to advancing engineering design. Engineers’ interaction with visual repr...

The development of immersive virtual reality (IVR) applications for design reviews is a major trend in the design field. While many different applications have been developed, there is little consensus on the functionalities necessary for these applications. This paper proposes a classification scheme for IVR functionalities related to design revie...

This paper examines the potential of immersive virtual reality technology for design education. A quasi-experimental study has been conducted with 40 students of different expertise levels. The students analysed a design representation using one of the two visualisation technologies: immersive virtual reality (IVR) and non-immersive virtual reality...

Mass customization (MC) has revolutionized various industries by enhancing product outcomes and customer experiences. While extensive research has explored implementation of MC in architecture, automotive, fashion, furniture, customer electronics and medical industry, there is a notable gap regarding its application within the dental industry. This...

The presented study investigates differences in engineering designers' CAD performance when modelling from two types of projections in technical drawings – isometric and orthographic. The results revealed significant differences in the percentage of correctly replicated components' size and shape, indicating better CAD outcomes when generating CAD...

Design sprints complement traditional teaching methods, especially in project-based learning courses. While this approach can potentially change Computer-Aided Design (CAD) usage, it is still underexplored. Therefore, this study explores the influence of design sprints on embodiment-focused CAD activities in project-based learning by examining diff...

This chapter presents the dynamics and interplay of individual and collaborative use of ICT tools during a design project-based learning course. During the COVID-19 pandemic, five teams (8–9 members) with members from Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria worked in a geographically distributed context. The results show that students utilise both in...

The concluding chapter briefly encapsulates the discussions throughout the volume, underlining the evolution and challenges of design research with a strong emphasis on its interdisciplinary nature. Contributions within the volume trace the historical development of design research, underscore the role of conferences in shaping the design community...

Objective The study has evaluated the accuracy (trueness and precision) of seven extraoral scanners when scanning two different types of jaws: simplified jaw with sharp edges and abutments and realistic jaw with natural teeth. The accuracies of extraoral scanners were compared, and their compliance with the required clinical accuracy levels was dis...

This paper examines and compares the ad-hoc reactions of educators in the product development domain to the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis. The aim of this study is to properly understand the difficulties educators struggled with maintaining their education process in a crisis and which practices, new digital tools, and educational methods best...

As an initial step towards a better understanding of cognitive load in computer-aided design (CAD), the herein presented study investigated cognitive load imposed on 24 mechanical engineers during two CAD modelling tasks of intentionally different complexity levels. The cognitive load has been rarely studied in the CAD context, which resulted in th...

This paper analyses the use of design methods and information and communication technology (ICTs) tools in design sprint (DS) activities. Team members, team leaders, and coaches of five international student teams were interviewed (40 interviews in total) regarding their use of design methods and ICT tools during three DS activities: problem defini...

The development of cloud-based Computer-aided design (CAD) enabled real-time CAD collaboration between multiple designers. While this technology has great potential to change the way CAD work is done, it is still little explored. This paper presents a case with two high-performing and two low-performing three-member teams monitored with non-invasiv...

Transition activities, such as design reviews, are often utilised in product development to evaluate the conducted work and plan future actions. While key decisions are made during these activities, they are still underexplored. This paper studies the effect of transition goals and virtual reality (VR) on transition team performance. In an experime...

The most common way to retrieve symmetry information (i.e., the planes and axes of symmetry) in 3D CAD models is through visual recognition by engineers. However, engineers are not able to visually recognize exact symmetry in any CAD model, and their ability to recognize symmetry decreases as the number of CAD models increases. To overcome these li...

During Computer-Aided Design (CAD), there is often the need to check if symmetrically designed 3D CAD models indeed exhibit the intended type of symmetry. However, the symmetry information is seldom directly stored in the native CAD models and never in the neutral exchange file formats. One way to retrieve the symmetry information is the visual rec...

A way of presenting information in visual representations of technical systems influences the progress and the outcome of the engineering design process. Consequently, an improvement of the means by which information is utilized (generated and interacted with) during the process is one suggested approach of advancing engineering design. Although en...

This paper proposes a framework for the systematic adaptation and digitalisation of engineering product development courses in the event of a crisis. Applicants can use resources of the framework to identify crisis-related boundary conditions that impact the delivery of education and are assisted in determining the necessary level of course digital...

Teamwork quality (TWQ) is often associated with project success. Therefore, understanding TWQ is crucial to have better design project outcomes. Since most of the studies in the past have presented a cross-sectional analysis of TWQ, the current work focuses on capturing TWQ in a longitudinal way for a project-based learning (PBL) course. The result...

The paper explores the differences between immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) during design reviews. Based on ten reviews with one designer and two reviewers, the study shows that CVEs affect verbal communication structure. More specifically, teams usually talked less, and reviewers exchanged significantly more tu...

Using the EEG features extracted from the EEG signals, the presented study investigates differences in the cognitive load posed on engineers while 3D CAD modelling in two different conditions, depending on the visual representations used as stimulus - a 2D and a 3D technical drawing of parts. The results indicate a higher cognitive load during the...

Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) such as virtual reality (VR) technologies have great potential to support design reviews. They enable users to view a design (solution) under review and simultaneously represent team members with social cues such as avatars. However, while CVEs are promising for design practice and education, it is still un...

Individual traits strongly impact team composition and the biases arising from them can also impact design activities. One such bias highlighted in the study is the familiarity bias (i.e., a bias that might be present between the two individuals due to their prior acquaintance). In order to detect the familiarity bias, participants from 4 universit...

This paper analyses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a distributed product design project-based learning (PBL). The paper presents the ICT use of five international student teams during three product design phases: identification of opportunities, conceptual design, embodiment design. General results show that student...

The presented research aims at modelling and formalising the process of team design activity as an interplay between the evolution of design problems and solutions. The motivation founds primarily on a presumption that there exist regularities in designing which can be captured and formalised using the appropriate models. The study thus investigate...

This paper presents an approach to identify and validate indicators for the use of virtual prototypes (VPs) during distributed design activities. Identification of indicators is based on various data collection methods (interview, observational methods, literature review), whereas their validation and usage are based on the protocol analysis method...

This study aims to present a procedure for optimisation of polymer gear pairs, along with the rough design guidelines. Multi-objective optimisation of polymer spur gear pairs was carried out. The gear pair module, face width, pinion number of teeth, and profile shift coefficients of both gears served as design variables. Two objective functions wer...

Design understanding and needed level of the accompanying spatial skills that enable it depend on information input provided by a visual representation of a design solution. During product development, designers use models to visually represent a design solution. These visual representations can be mediated by various technologies (for example, an...

The conventional prescriptive and descriptive models of design typically decompose the overall design process into elementary processes, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This study revisits some of the assumptions established by these models and investigates whether they can also be applied for modelling of problem-solution co-evolution...

This paper builds on the turn-taking model of verbal communication and proposes a framework for relating the problem-solving style to the turn-taking model. The framework aims at enabling a more comprehensive investigation of verbal communication in team design activities. An empirical study has been conducted to test the framework and identify the...

This paper suggests that analysing the effect of visualisation technologies during design reviews should include variables related to design reviewers’ expertise and focus on the process variables rather than the outcomes. The experiment showed better averages in terms of design understanding for groups in desktop interface than for groups in virtu...

Interactive computer-supported information visualisations are being increasingly used in design. However, while there are frameworks that discuss how traditional representations, such as sketches, CAD models and static diagrams support design tasks, no such mapping exists for interactive visualisations of product-related information. As novel contr...

The paper presents the original integration of ICT tools and e-learning platform into an infrastructure to support Project-based learning for a design class that is geographically distributed across different countries. 30 Mechanical Engineering students from 4 European countries tested the infrastructure prototype for the development of an innovat...

Design review (DR) is a product development (PD) activity used to inspect the technical characteristics of a design solution. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology enables the presentation of spatial information and interaction with 3D CAD models inside an immersive virtual environment (IVE). Such capabilities have shown the potential to mitig...

Dimensional and geometric tolerances affect both the cost and the functionality of a given product. Finding the acceptable trade-off between the two is among the common engineering tasks. Thus, many tolerance analysis methods are developed to help engineers and assist in the decision-making process. In this article, the authors have assessed four t...

There is a critical gap in understanding how meso-scale team processes i.e. interactions between individuals in a team, develop in design teams and specifically how they dynamically balance design/managerial effort. We treat this deficit by contrasting two in-depth cases using work sampling data. We identify a number of contributions. First, we des...

The plain bearings are often used due to their compact dimensions and low cost. Their frictional and wear properties are affected by several parameters; load, sliding velocity, temperature, and surface roughness, among others. In this article, the authors have experimentally investigated the influence of clearance size on the friction and wear i...

Use of virtual reality (VR) is considered beneficial for reviewing 3D models throughout product design. However, research on its usability in the design field is still explorative, and previous studies are often contradictory regarding the usability of VR for 3D model review. This paper argues that the usability of VR should be assessed by analysin...

Studies of design activity have been dominantly reporting on different aspects of the design process, rather than the content of designing. The aim of the presented research has been the development and application of an approach for a fine-grain analysis of the design content communicated between designers during the team conceptual design activit...

Sketching-related activities are considered as an essential form of communication in the early phases of a design process. In the presented study, it is argued that both the sketching and the sketch-related verbalisations are reflected in the level of elaboration of the sketching outputs. Hence, a protocol study was conducted to analyse the frequen...

The purpose of the study is to model the micro-scale process patterns which can be identified during team conceptual design activities. A state-transition model has been developed and used to empirically investigate the patterns of design operations during two types of team conceptual design activities: ideation and concept review. The presented wo...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a modified methodology for concept evaluation by applying Axiomatic Design principles. Several drawbacks were recognised during the literature review and application of established Axiomatic Design principles that limit its use for concept evaluation. These drawbacks include the lack of analysis of con...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a modified methodology for concept evaluation by applying Axiomatic Design principles. Several drawbacks were recognised during the literature review and application of established Axiomatic Design principles that limit its use for concept evaluation. These drawbacks include the lack of analysis of con...

While risk quantification research has grown over the last few decades, only a limited number of studies have addressed the overall process integration of these approaches in design risk management. This paper argues that the choice of risk quantification method has strong implications for several process aspects. We investigate current risk manage...

Effective development of production processes within modern engineering projects requires project management to take into consideration the sociotechnical project aspects, such as insights into individual and team work, including how much time team members spend on different activities, how they communicate, within what context and in what manner....

Significant challenge exists in the effective monitoring and management of engineering design and development projects. Due to traits such as contextual variation and scale, detailed understanding of engineering projects and activity are difficult to form, with monitoring hence reliant on interpretation of managerial personnel and adherence to defi...

Presented research explores the nature of teamwork activity in the conceptual design phase with an aim to unfold the patterns of team behaviour during execution of a specific design task. Teamwork activity process is observed as a sequence of analysis, synthesis and evaluation design operations applied to the problem and solution spaces. Design ope...

Failure identification and analysis is catching a lot of attention in research and practice constantly, trying to incorporate more integrative approaches to enable deeper understanding of the failures and more efficient support for the solving process. Although several techniques exist to address such type of problems that usually are used as an in...

Recent developments in engineering design management point to the need for more dynamic, fine-grain measurement approaches able to deal with multi-dimensional, cross-level process performance in product design. Thus, this paper proposes a new approach to the measurement and management of individual and teamwork performance in engineering design pro...

For effective management of development projects, it is necessary to take into consideration its socio-technical perspective – working processes, teamwork and features of the working environment. Data gathering about socio-technical aspects of the product development activities is often hampered by constraints of the actual working environment in R...

Large-scale engineering projects are challenging to monitor, manage, and improve. This paper presents an approach to addressing part of this challenge - the automatic detection of engineering activity through the project lifecycle. By monitoring the focus of work in real-time, this aims to enable managers to build a detailed understanding of the ac...

The aim of this paper is to explore different aspects of information-related activities in product development teams. To enable analysis of information behaviour at lower level of process granularity and to allow longer data collection with several participants, work sampling self-reporting approach was selected as an appropriate one for data colle...

Current management methods for intangible aspects of development projects are diversified across different research fields with lot of open questions. This paper presents a practical approach for monitoring, measuring and simulation of individual and teamwork performance within the collaborative engineering development and design projects.