Design is a ubiquitous human activity. Design is valued by individuals, teams, organizations, and cultures. There are patterns and recurrent phenomena across the diverse set of approaches to design and also variances. Designers can benefit from leveraging conceptual tools like process models, methods, and design principles to amplify design phenomena. There are many variant process models, methods, and principles for design. Likewise, usage of these conceptual tools differentiates in industrial contexts. We present an integrated process model, with exemplar methods and design principles that is synthesized from a review of several case studies in client based industrial design projects for product, service, and system development, professional education courses, and literature review. Concepts from several branches of design practice: (1) design thinking, (2) business design, (3) systems engineering, and (4) design engineering are integrated. A design process model, method set, and set of abstracted design principles are porposed.

Recent research demonstrates the importance of prototyping to support early stage design efforts. There remains a substantial opportunity to provide tools that codify the leap between the logical objectives of the design effort, and an individual’s intuitive design and fabrication experience. This study investigates project articles on the open source, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) design repository, Instructables.com. The database contains guides for producing low cost functional prototypes. Many entries in the repository include documentation of the design process along with instructions for fabrication. Through a systematic research methodology, we extract five prototype design and fabrication principles from articles in the database. An online crowdsourced assessment enables inter-rater testing, with multiple parallel raters. This assessment validates presence of the principles in the database. A controlled study was conducted in which one of two groups was exposed to the principles. This study evaluates connectivity, successful adoption of the principles by participants in the experimental group, and resulting design performance effects. Two case studies of prototyping are also provided. Observations indicate that application of the principles positively impacts prototyping outcomes. A potential area for improvement is edge case evaluation, i.e. principles only found in a single extraordinary sample.

This paper studies an interdisciplinary approach for improving smart energy systems, and, in particular, building energy efficiency. Currently, energy audit is the most widely used approach to improve building energy efficiency. Energy audit increases the building energy efficiency by identifying, analyzing and implementing energy saving opportunities in existing buildings. The procedure of existing energy audit approach is relatively standardized, and energy audit professionals usually refer to Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs) checklists to determine opportunities for energy savings. In this context, this paper aims to improve the general energy audit process by integrating, adapting, and extending Design Innovation (DI) techniques which help to identify more energy saving opportunities beyond the existing energy audit checklists and deliver user-centered and disruptive innovative energy-saving solutions which are missing in the traditional energy audit procedure. The motivation, advantages, and the implementation procedure of selected DI approaches are explained separately. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, an example of developing a smart energy system for a building testbed is given.