Design effort, the amount of time required to complete a project or task (Salam et al., 2009; Salam and Bhuiyan, 2016), is a required resource for any design project which can be influenced by a number of factors. Estimating design effort is a significant challenge that can be mitigated through an understanding of these influential factors. This understanding is held as tacit knowledge by experts, earned through experience; yet, although these factors vary in type and impact, understanding their details can provide insight and improve future estimations. Some previous methods to estimate design effort identify these factors, either from: expert opinion, or historical data analysis with each approach has advantages and disadvantages.This paper is comprised of three parts:A review of published methods and tools for estimating product design effort and whether they consider and identify influential factors; an analysis of possible trends in the identification of factors influencing product design project length; and a new method for identifying the influential factors of product design project length.

There is a need for responsible engineering design to accommodate the diverse user requirements that come with the global phenomenon of population ageing. Inclusive design can address these diverse requirements through the consideration of a wide diversity of user needs within the design process. However, uptake of inclusive design in industry is limited, with designer awareness of the approach and its associated methods and tools noted as barriers to its uptake. This research aims to understand the current approach to inclusive design education within UK Higher Education Institutions, utilising interviews with design educators and a student survey. The study concluded that teaching of inclusive design varied between institutions with conflicting responses from academics and students relating to the methodologies taught. This study recommends that greater transparency should be encouraged between institutions to encourage the development of a cohesive inclusive design education strategy, in addition to the development of a framework to aid the implementation of appropriate inclusive methods and tools within the design process.

Design effort is a key resource for product design projects. Environments where design effort is scarce, and therefore valuable, include hackathons and other time-limited design challenges. Predicting design effort needs is key to successful project planning; therefore, understanding design effort-influencing factors (objective considerations that are universally accepted to exert influence on a subject, that is, types of phenomena, constraints, characteristics, or stimulus) will aid in planning success, offering an improved organizational understanding of product design, characterizing the design space and providing a perspective to assess project briefs from the outset. This paper presents the Collaborative Factor Identification for Design Effort (CoFIDE) Method based on Hird's (2012) method for developing resource forecasting tools for new product development teams. CoFIDE enables the collection of novel data of, and insight into, the collaborative understanding and perceptions of the most influential factors of design effort levels in design projects and how their behavior changes over the course of design projects. CoFIDE also enables design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators to characterize their creative spaces, to quickly enable mutual understanding, without the need for complex software and large bodies of past project data. This insight offers design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators opportunities to capitalize on positive influences while minimizing negative influences. This paper demonstrates the use of CoFIDE through a case study with a UK-based product design agency, which enabled the design team to identify and model the behavior of four influential factors.

Designers use their tacit knowledge to estimate project design effort needs, which can be enhanced through the understanding of the factors that most influence those needs. Evaluating and assessing project briefs against these factors can assist designers when planning their projects. The Collaborative Project Brief Scorecard (CPDS) Method identifies those factors and produces a scorecard for designers to evaluate project briefs based on these factors and allows for project comparisons, aids in past project recall and provides a focal point for collaborative reflection on design activities.

Teaching the same design module to two different cohorts, traditional design students and industry-based students, the outcomes of the conceptual design stage has shown differences in divergence achieved, looking at both number and quality of concepts. The activities of both cohorts across two years are explored, combining on campus studio based teaching and online teaching, through comparison of teaching approaches for both cohorts and their effect on the design outcomes. Findings show that the traditional design students create significantly larger number of concepts, discussed in more detail and engage more fully in the divergence-convergence design process. Then the recommendations are provided for approaches and techniques that could be implemented to the industry-based student teaching to encourage divergence during idea generation. These include increased levels of studio work focused design work separated from industry needs, more structure and mandatory use of all instructed design techniques by inclusion in the assessment, increased focus on intermediate tasks and contextualisation of design terms to the fields they are familiar with.