Publications
266 results found
Liuqing C, Zhaojun J, Duowei X, et al., 2024, BIDTrainer: an LLMs-driven education tool for enhancing the understanding and reasoning in bio-inspired design, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), Publisher: ACM
Bio-inspired design (BID) fosters innovations in engineering. Learning BID is crucial for developing multidisciplinary innovation skillsof designers and engineers. Current BID education aims to enhancelearners’ understanding and analogical reasoning skills. However,it often heavily relies on the teachers’ expertise. When learnerspursue independent learning using some educational tools, theyface challenges in understanding and reasoning practice withinthis multidisciplinary field. Additionally, evaluating their learningoutcomes comprehensively becomes problematic. Addressing thesechallenges, we introduce a LLMs-driven BID education methodbased on a structured ontology and three strategies: enhancingunderstanding through LLMs-enpowered "learning by asking", assisting reasoning by providing hints and feedback, and assessinglearning outcomes through benchmarking against existing BIDcases. Implementing the method, we developed BIDTrainer, a BID education tool. User studies indicate that learners using BIDTrainerunderstood BID knowledge better, reason faster with higher interactivity than the baseline, and BIDTrainer assessed the learningoutcomes consistent with experts.
Jagtap SS, Childs PRN, Stettler MEJ, 2024, Performance sensitivity of subsonic liquid hydrogen long-range tube-wing aircraft to technology developments, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Vol: 50, Pages: 820-833, ISSN: 0360-3199
Liquid hydrogen (LH2) may enable the decarbonisation of long-haul aviation. However, its low volumetric energy density and subsequent tank space and weight requirements could penalise an aircraft's specific energy consumption (SEC, MJ/tonne-km). We evaluate the impacts of developments in four technology areas – aerodynamics, structures, cryo-tank gravimetric index (η), and overall efficiency (ηo) – on the design-point performance of a large subsonic tube-wing LH2 aircraft. We characterise the critical value of η, which must be exceeded to enable a given design range. For a design range of 14,000 km, η must exceed 0.52 today but only 0.35 with expected 2030 airframe and engine efficiency improvements. Using the most optimistic technology development estimates we observe that SEC could reduce by ∼25% via improvements in ηo and aerodynamics and by 33% via improvements in all four areas. Developments in technologies to improve ηo and reduce drag are critical to enabling zero-carbon long-haul air travel.
Ratcliffe E, Baxter W, Aurisicchio M, et al., 2023, The role of ritual communication in consumption: A consumer coffee experience, International Journal of Food Design, ISSN: 2056-6522
<jats:p>Rituals are part of the consumer experience of goods, especially food and drink, and can contribute to consumer enjoyment of and fidelity to a specific product. However, we lack detailed description of food/beverage-related rituals and their potential impact on consumer perceptions, in particular whether and how communicating those rituals to consumers influences their attitudes. Here we use coffee as an example of a ritualized product within the UK market to explore this potential relationship and identify opportunities for design. In Study 1, we identified rituals associated with coffee preparation and consumption. In Study 2, we found that several procedural aspects of the rituals identified in Study 1 were not consistently conveyed in coffee advertising, indicating a potential gap in communication with consumers. In Study 3, we showed that communicating such rituals to consumers resulted in significantly greater willingness to pay for coffee, mediated by perceptions of social attention. This work connects growing interest in the psychological mechanisms of ritual with work on consumer perceptions and behaviour and carries significant implications for the design of messaging around food experience.</jats:p>
Han J, Jiang P, Hua M, et al., 2023, An exploration of the role of creativity in crowdfunding product design projects, ICED23, Pages: 535-544, ISSN: 2732-527X
Crowdfunding is becoming increasingly popular for funding projects, particularly in the domain of product design, by asking a large group of people. Previous studies have indicated that creativity plays a significant role in product design and is considered an important factor of success for new product design and development. However, these studies have not explicitly explored the role of creativity in crowdfunding product design projects. This paper investigates this issue by conducting a case study employing expert evaluations of selected successful and unsuccessful crowdfunding product design project samples. The results of the study show there is a positive relationship between the creativity of a product and the success of its crowdfunding campaign. Therefore, creativity can be considered a success factor of crowdfunding. The study also suggests creative products, especially useful ones, might have more potential to attract people's willingness to fund them. This paper has contributed to the research on design, creativity, product design and development, and funding business models. Most importantly, this paper has raised the significance of creativity in design and business.
Yin Y, Childs P, 2023, Relations between cognitive ability and creative design quality, International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED23), Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Pages: 3055-3064, ISSN: 2732-527X
The study aims to identify the relations between creative design quality and content of the memorising precedents, association, and combination of information processes in a design context. 71 participants were recruited to finish a creative design task. Think aloud and interview were conducted during and after the creative design task to understand the content of the memorising precedents, association, and combination of information processes. The 71 creative designs were then assessed by five experts in creative design. The results from this study revealed that participants who generated high-creativity design tend to memorize various topic-related precedents, associate items based on topic-related information, and combine topic-related information with products. Participants who generated low-creativity design tend to memorize characteristics of a specific space of the design topic, associate items based on specific topic-related information, and add the topic-related pattern to a product.
Childs P, 2023, Radial flow rurbocompressors, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part A: Journal of Power and Energy, Vol: 237, Pages: 602-602, ISSN: 0957-6509
Wang B, Zuo H, Cai Z, et al., 2023, A task-decomposed AI-aided approach for generative conceptual design, ASME 2023 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2023)
Generative algorithm-based conceptual design has beeninnovatively applied as an emerging digital design paradigm forearly-stage design ideation. With powerful large languagemodels (LLMs), designers can enter an initial prompt as a designrequirement to generate using machine reasoning capabilitydescriptive natural language content. The machine-generatedoutput can be used as stimuli to inspire designers during designideation. However, the lack of transparency and insufficientcontrollability of LLMs can limit their effectiveness whenassisting humans on a generative conceptual design task. Thisgeneration process lacks theoretical guidance and acomprehensive understanding of design requirements, whichmay potentially lead to generated concepts that are mismatchedor lack creativity. Inspired by the Function-Behavior-Structure(FBS) model, this paper proposes a task-decomposed AI-aidedapproach for generative conceptual design. We decompose aconceptual design task into three sub-tasks including functionalreasoning, behavioral reasoning, and structural reasoning.Prompt templates and specification signifiers are specified fordifferent steps to guide the LLMs to generate reasonable results,controllably. The output of each step becomes the input of thenext, aiding in aggregating gains per step and embedding theselection preferences of human designers at each stage. Aconceptual design experiment is conducted, and the results showthat the conceptual design ideation with our method are morereasonable and creative in comparison to a baseline.
Yu Z, Sadati H, Perera S, et al., 2023, Tapered whisker reservoir computing for real-time terrain identification-based navigation, Scientific Reports, Vol: 13, Pages: 1-13, ISSN: 2045-2322
This paper proposes a new method for real-time terrain recognition-based navigation for mobile robots. Mobile robots performing tasks in unstructured environments need to adapt their trajectories in real-time to achieve safe and efficient navigation in complex terrains. However, current methods largely depend on visual and IMU (inertial measurement units) that demand high computational resources for real-time applications. In this paper, a real-time terrain identification-based navigation method is proposed using an on-board tapered whisker-based reservoir computing system. The nonlinear dynamic response of the tapered whisker was investigated in various analytical and Finite Element Analysis frameworks to demonstrate its reservoir computing capabilities. Numerical simulations and experiments were cross-checked with each other to verify that whisker sensors can separate different frequency signals directly in the time domain and demonstrate the computational superiority of the proposed system, and that different whisker axis locations and motion velocities provide variable dynamical response information. Terrain surface-following experiments demonstrated that our system could accurately identify changes in the terrain in real-time and adjust its trajectory to stay on specific terrain.
Yin Y, Zuo H, Childs PRN, 2023, An EEG-based method to decode cognitive factors in creative processes, AI EDAM-ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN ANALYSIS AND MANUFACTURING, Vol: 37, ISSN: 0890-0604
Michalakoudis I, Dimitriou P, Koutlidis A, et al., 2023, Functional Analysis Diagrams in Science and Technology Education, EDUCATION SCIENCES, Vol: 13
Park D, Han J, Childs PRN, 2023, A data-driven fuzzy front end model for contextual performance and concurrent collaboration, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol: 70, Pages: 660-683, ISSN: 0018-9391
A data-driven model for the fuzzy front end (FFE) stage in new product development (NPD) programs, with a series of toolkits to decrease uncertainty and ambiguity of parameter processing, has been developed. Parameters produced in toolkits provided in previous models tend to exist independently, without any interrelationship in the contextual performance relationship of a single functional domain nor concurrent collaboration relationship across multiple functional domains. This results in uncertainty and ambiguity triggered by an incorrect interpretation of parameters. The new model involved inferring a single representative FFE scenario wherein diverse FFE performance structures interlock from the contextual performance and concurrent collaboration perspectives by analyzing various real-world FFE scenarios gathered from NPD expert interviews. This representative scenario was embodied into the model with a performative structure, through deployment of toolkits. Users are informed of the purpose, roles, and meanings of parameters and their relationships and thus can infer each parameter from other parameters. This contributes to reduction in uncertainty and ambiguity in processing parameters. This article proposes an FFE execution concept, giving mathematical reasoning behind the performance structure of the model.
Yin Y, Haoyu Z, Peter C, 2023, Impacts of cognitive factors on creativity quality in design: identification from performance in recall, association and combination, Journal of Intelligence, Vol: 11, Pages: 1-22, ISSN: 2079-3200
The reason why people have different creativity quality levels may depend on their different performances relating to other cognitive factors that are important for creativity. This study was designed to identify the performance of three cognitive factors (recall, association, and combination) that a designer may use in a creative process and then identify how the differing performance for these cognitive factors will affect creativity quality levels. Seventy-one participants were recruited to undertake a design task and complete a semi-structured interview. The results indicate that, in a creative design process, similar performances in recall, association, and combination can result in differences in creativity quality level.
Jagtap SS, Childs PRN, Stettler MEJ, 2023, Energy performance evaluation of alternative energy vectors for subsonic long-range tube-wing aircraft, TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART D-TRANSPORT AND ENVIRONMENT, Vol: 115, ISSN: 1361-9209
Dewulf S, Günther S, Childs PRN, et al., 2023, Opening up New Fields of Application with TRIZ Reverse – Conceptual Framework, Software Application, and Implementation Challenges, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland, Pages: 55-69, ISBN: 9783031425318
Yin Y, Wang P, Han J, et al., 2023, Comparing Designers' EEG Activity Characteristics for Common Association and Remote Association, 10th International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition (DCC), Publisher: SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG, Pages: 255-267
Wang B, Zhu Y, Chen L, et al., 2023, A study of the evaluation metrics for generative images containing combinational creativity, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, Vol: 37, Pages: 1-19, ISSN: 0890-0604
In the field of content generation by machine, the state-of-the-art text-to-image model, DALL⋅E, has advanced and diverse capacities for the combinational image generation with specific textual prompts. The images generated by DALL⋅E seem to exhibit an appreciable level of combinational creativity close to that of humans in terms of visualizing a combinational idea. Although there are several common metrics which can be applied to assess the quality of the images generated by generative models, such as IS, FID, GIQA, and CLIP, it is unclear whether these metrics are equally applicable to assessing images containing combinational creativity. In this study, we collected the generated image data from machine (DALL⋅E) and human designers, respectively. The results of group ranking in the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) and the Turing Test (TT) were used as the benchmarks to assess the combinational creativity. Considering the metrics’ mathematical principles and different starting points in evaluating image quality, we introduced coincident rate (CR) and average rank variation (ARV) which are two comparable spaces. An experiment to calculate the consistency of group ranking of each metric by comparing the benchmarks then was conducted. By comparing the consistency results of CR and ARV on group ranking, we summarized the applicability of the existing evaluation metrics in assessing generative images containing combinational creativity. In the four metrics, GIQA performed the closest consistency to the CAT and TT. It shows the potential as an automated assessment for images containing combinational creativity, which can be used to evaluate the images containing combinational creativity in the relevant task of design and engineering such as conceptual sketch, digital design image, and prototyping image.
Zuo H, Jing Q, Song T, et al., 2022, WikiLink: An Encyclopedia-Based Semantic Network for Design Creativity, JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE, Vol: 10
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- Citations: 1
Yin Y, Pan W, Childs P, 2022, Understanding creativity process through EEG measurement on creativity-related cognitive factors, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Vol: 8, Pages: 1-15, ISSN: 1662-453X
Neurotechnology approaches, such as electroencephalography (EEG), can aid understanding of the cognitive processes behind creativity. To identify and compare the EEG characteristics of creativity-related cognitive factors (remote association, common association, combination, recall and retrieval), 30 participants were recruited to conduct an EEG induction study. From the event-related potential (ERP) results and spectral analysis, the study supports that creativity is related to the frontal lobe areas of the brain and common association is an unconscious process. The results help explain why some creativity-related cognitive factors are involved either more or less readily than others in the creative design process from workload aspects. This study identifies the part of the brain that is involved in the combination cognitive factor and detects the ERP results on cognitive factors. This study can be used by designers and researchers to further understand the cognitive processes of creativity.
Han J, Park D, Hua M, et al., 2022, Is group work beneficial for producing creative designs in STEM design education?, International Journal of Technology and Design Education, Vol: 32, Pages: 2801-2826, ISSN: 0957-7572
Creativity is a significant element in design education, and frequently a significant competency during recruitment for design professions. Group work and individual work are widely employed in higher education. Many studies have highlighted the merits of employing group work in design education, cultivating collaborative design abilities and fostering sought-after employability skills. Although the benefits of group work in design practice and education are widely recognised, few studies have shown evidence that group work outperforms individual work regarding creative design activities in higher education contexts. Therefore, the aim of this research is to explore whether group or individual work is more beneficial for fostering students in generating creative designs in STEM design education. A case study, involving two cohorts of second-year undergraduate students studying a UK Engineering degree Industrial Design programme, is reported. The case study compares the design outputs produced by the two cohorts tackling the same design challenge in a product design module but employing individual and group work, respectively. The case study results show that no significant differences have been found between the design outputs produced by group work and individual work, considering novelty, usefulness and overall creativity. Further analysis reveals that a student’s academic performance is not significantly related to the level of creativity of the design produced. This research indicates design educators should employ both group and individual work to complement each other in design education, and suggests potential solutions to enhance students’ design creativity.
Childs P, Han J, Chen L, et al., 2022, The creativity diamond - a framework to aid creativity, Journal of Intelligence, Vol: 10, Pages: 1-20, ISSN: 2079-3200
There are many facets to creativity and the topic has a profound impact on society. Substantial and sustained study on creativity has been undertaken and much is now known about the fun-damentals and how creativity can be augmented. To draw these elements together a framework has been developed called the creativity diamond, formulated based on reviews of prior work as well as consideration of 20 PhD studies on the topics of creativity, design, innovation and product development. The framework embodies the principles that quantity of ideas breeds quality through selection, and that a range of creativity tools can provoke additional ideas to augment our innate creativity. The creativity diamond proposed is a tool consisting of a divergent phase as-sociated with the development of many distinctive ideas and a convergent phase associated with the refinement of ideas. The creativity diamond framework can be used to prompt and help select which tool or approach to use in a creative environment for innovative tasks. The framework has now been used by many students and professionals in diverse contexts.
Childs P, 2022, Radial flow turbocompressors, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part A: Journal of Power and Energy, Vol: 236, Pages: 1-1, ISSN: 0957-6509
Simpson K, Cockbill S, Childs P, 2022, Home energy renovation: UK owner-occupied householder uncertainties, information and data needs, IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, Vol: 1085, Pages: 1-8, ISSN: 1755-1307
Homes must become low energy, resilient to climate change and provide comfort for households, as part of the European renovation wave. Renovation involves millions of decisions and actions. Owner-occupied households are a key group of decision-makers, but with conflicting demands on their time and finances. Householders collect information from multiple sources. However, previous research has found that the detail of available information and data on renovation is difficult to find. Therefore, this paper aims to identify householder uncertainties and related information and data needs, to support early-stage energy renovation decision-making. Co-design has been found to be beneficial in designing energy demand reduction strategies, leading to meaningful outcomes for householders, however, it was found to lead to further information requirements. The open virtual information exchange reported here, inspired by co-design and virtual workshop approaches, was effective in identifying uncertainties and gathering feedback on information types and data to address them. Householders' require trusted specialists to visit the home in-person. The information identified could be shared via trials at renovation information hubs, potentially using digital apps to connect renovation opportunity, householders' and trusted practitioners. There is much householder uncertainty around housing renovation and more work is needed to move able-to-pay householders from renovation planning to renovation in practice.
Yu Z, Sadati SMH, Hauser H, et al., 2022, A Semi-Supervised Reservoir Computing System Based on Tapered Whisker for Mobile Robot Terrain Identification and Roughness Estimation, IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, Vol: 7, Pages: 5655-5662, ISSN: 2377-3766
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- Citations: 3
Yu Z, Perera S, Hauser H, et al., 2022, A tapered whisker-based physical reservoir computing system for mobile robot terrain identification in unstructured environments, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol: 7, Pages: 3608-3615, ISSN: 2377-3766
In this letter, we present for the first time the use of tapered whisker-based reservoir computing (TWRC) system mounted on a mobile robot for terrain classification and roughness estimation of unknown terrain.Hall effect sensors captured the oscillations at different locations along a tapered spring that served as a reservoir to map time-domain vibrations signals caused by the interaction perturbations from the ground to frequency domain features directly. Three hall sensors are used to measure the whisker reservoir outputs and these temporal signals could be processed efficiently by the proposed TWRC system which can provide morphological computation power for data processing and reduce the model training cost compared to the convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches.To predict the unknown terrain properties, an extended TWRC method including a novel detector is proposed based on the Mahalanobis distance in the Eigen space, which has been experimentally demonstrated to be feasible and sufficiently accurate.We achieved a prediction success rate of 94.3\% for six terrain surface classification experiments and 88.7\% for roughness estimation of the unknown terrain surface.
Wagh SM, Napier AA, Clifford M, et al., 2022, Self-Supervised Task Learning For Robotic Underfloor Insulation, Pages: 358-363
Effective under-floor insulation (UFI) of residential buildings to reduce their energy consumption and CO2 emissions is a substantive challenge in retrofitting existing homes. Traditional UFI installation techniques require suspended floors to be taken up, damaging and disrupting the living space for several days. To deliver the low-disruption insulation of suspended floors, a robot has been developed for accessing and spraying thermal insulation to the underside of a suspended floor. Q-Bot has been installing UFI with a fleet of robots in a largely teleoperated mode for several years. In this mode, the operator is in complete control of all actions the robot takes, which is a significant cognitive burden. This paper addresses Q-Bot's steps toward automating the UFI installation process, reducing the operator's cognitive load and eventually freeing the operator to perform other tasks. Years of recorded experience are leveraged to train a simplified U-Net model in a self-supervised fashion, enabling robots to decide where to apply the insulation foam next. Results obtained from the on-site collected data show that the weighted symmetric cross-entropy loss function yields better spray-region prediction results than the base loss, Cross-Entropy. Our method can adapt to various operator preferences, generalise to novel building crawl spaces, and improve with more data.
Yu Z, SMHadi S, Hasitha W, et al., 2021, A method to use nonlinear dynamics in a whisker sensor for terrain identification by mobile robots, 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 8437-8443
This paper shows analytical and experimental evidence of using the vibration dynamics of a compliant whisker for accurate terrain classification during steady state motion of a mobile robot. A Hall effect sensor was used to measure whisker vibrations due to perturbations from the ground. Analytical results predict that the whisker vibrations will have a dominant frequency at the vertical perturbation frequency of the mobile robot sandwiched by two other less dominant but distinct frequency components. These frequency components may come from bifurcation of vibration frequency due to nonlinear interaction dynamics at steady state. Experimental results also exhibit distinct dominant frequency components unique to the speed of the robot and the terrain roughness. This nonlinear dynamic feature is used in a deep multi-layer perceptron neural network to classify terrains. We achieved 85.6% prediction success rate for seven flat terrain surfaces with different textures.Index Terms— Robotic whiskers, Surface identification, multi-layer perceptron, Modal analysis.
Jiang P, Dieckmann E, Han J, et al., 2021, A Bibliometric Review of Sustainable Product Design, ENERGIES, Vol: 14
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- Citations: 5
Sikhwal RK, Childs PRN, 2021, Towards Mass Individualisation: setting the scope and industrial implication, Design Science, Vol: 7, Pages: 1-34, ISSN: 2053-4701
Within the last few years, a need for renewed product personalisation has been observed in some markets such as consumer electronics, fashion to meet the exact demands of the customers. Product customisation emphasises the fulfilment of explicit requirements of a defined market segment, but product individualisation targets at satisfying the particular needs of a customer. Mass Individualisation (MI) is a new product design approach comprising of an open hardware platform and multiple modules to be integrated with the platform. It gives freedom to end-users to integrate different modules into the platform as per their choice. Technological and strategic integration of all actors involved in the design process is the primary focus of this research. This paper identifies key areas which need to be focussed on to realise this approach and convert it into an industrial practice by an explorative study of existing product design and customisation approaches. An industrial survey was conducted, and results for the industrial implication and insights on this approach are presented. The findings show that the end product from product design for MI will be more creative and innovative by the networking of all actors, and offers more individualised and technologically advanced products.
Han J, Jiang P, Childs PRN, 2021, Metrics for Measuring Sustainable Product Design Concepts, ENERGIES, Vol: 14
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- Citations: 6
Park D, Han J, Childs PRN, 2021, 266 Fuzzy front-end studies: current state and future directions for new product development, Research in Engineering Design, Vol: 32, Pages: 377-409, ISSN: 0934-9839
266 fuzzy front-end (FFE) studies in the new product development (NPD) sector were examined. The studies were selected using a bibliometrics method, and chronologically and statistically examined with ten criteria divided into two dimensions. The first dimension is associated with overall attributes of the FFE, consisting of six criteria: the study taxonomy, model type, NPD speed, NPD attributes, model characteristic, and model structure. The second dimension is relevant to the FFE performance structure related to process parameters, comprised of four criteria: the FFE task, activity, performance method, and toolkit. In terms of those two dimensions, the paper looks at previous FFE studies to gain an understanding of features of each FFE study along with related knowledge and theories, as well as identification of evolution trends of FFE studies. Based on the identification, an FFE model development strategy for each criterion is formulated, and this paper proposes possible options for executing those strategies which exert influence on the form of the cluster network. The intention is for the database to be utilised as an overview of all existing FFE studies and allow specific FFE studies to be selected to examine FFE approaches.This paper provides FFE model development guidance on how to deal with the overall attributes and outcomes of the FFE which affect the entirety of the innovation process, and how to manage the performance structure related to process parameters.
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