Lower costs and higher employee satisfaction are some of the benefits driving organizations to adopt dispersed and virtual working arrangements. Despite these advantages, product design engineering teams—those who develop physical products—have not widely adopted this working style due to perceived critical dependence on physical facilities and the belief that it is ineffective to communicate technical details virtually. This paper uses the mass shift in working conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the feasibility of virtual and distributed work in product design engineering. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with product design engineers working virtually to uncover current challenges of, and the beginning of promising strategies for, effective virtual engineering work. We categorize and analyze Tangible Design activities, Intangible Design activities, and Communication and Project Management activities throughout the product design process. Contrary to present opinions, we found that much of a product design engineer's work is realizable in a virtual and distributed setting. However, there are still many challenges, especially when attempting Tangible Design activities—those that require physical products and tools—from home. These challenges, missing from existing virtual product design engineering literature, include but are not limited to individuals’ lessened sense of accountability, fewer de-risking opportunities before product sign-off, and limited supervision of production staff. Product design engineers described novel strategies that emerged organically to mitigate these challenges, such as creating digital alternatives for engineering reviews and sign-offs and leveraging rapid prototyping. Recent advances in technology, an increased commitment to reducing environmental impact, and better work-life balance expectations from new generations of workers will only push society faster towards a distributed working model. Thus, it is critical that we use this opportunity to understand the existing challenges for distributed product design engineers, so that organizations can best prepare and become resilient to future shocks.

This paper presents the findings of a preliminary study comparing implementation of design changes using various computer-aided design (CAD) working styles. Our study compares individuals’ and pairs’ completion of a series of changes to a toy car CAD model. We discuss the results in terms of productivity and value added ratio, derived from time-based quantitative data. We also discuss qualitative findings acquired through post-study surveys. Overall, our findings suggest that pairs were less efficient than individual designers due to overheads like communication, history dependency and complex couplings within the CAD model tree. However, it is also noteworthy that within each pair the lead participant's performance was at par with individual participants. Lastly, we also discuss behaviors and patterns that emerge as unique to the synchronous collaborative environment, motivating future work.

The post-paralysis due to stroke, spinal cord injury or musculoskeletal disorder can be restored by rehabilitation. A popular rehabilitation method used today are physiotherapy and therapy using electrical stimulation. Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is one of the methods of rehabilitation using electrical stimuli, and has been proven to be effective enough to restore muscle function that is weakened due to paralysis. Nowadays, FES devices on the market are designed to rehabilitate only one type of movement and not yet applied wearable and ergonomics design. Meanwhile, the FES devices developed by the laboratory has applied a wearable design and has been able to rehabilitate several movements at once, but not yet for ergonomics design. This study developed a usability instrument and do the usability evaluation for the FES medical devices which is rehabilitate multiple movements on the upper limb. The usability variables chosen for the usability evaluation are simplicity, learnability, memorability, informativeness, and trust ability. Usability evaluation is carried out by distributing questionnaires. Data obtained from the propagation of the questionnaire are processed by statistic method such as average value and standard deviation. The results indicate that the simplicity, learnability, and memorability variables were well applied to the developed FES devices. While the variables informativeness and trust ability dimension are still not properly applied to developed FES devices.

Inspired by popular personality type indicators, we develop a framework for classifying individuals by their computer-aided design (CAD) behaviours. We are motivated by the trend of modern CAD software towards cloud platforms and expanded collaborative features. Cloud-CAD platforms enable collaboration by increasing access, and reducing conflicts and barriers to file-sharing. In order to generate insight to support CAD collaboration, we analyze the real-world data from an industry partner’s product development project, consisting of eight professional designers working on a cloud-CAD platform. This data corresponds to more than 1,420,000 actions over a span of eight months. Via hierarchical clustering, we group 79 unique CAD activities into 14 categories of CAD action groups, such as Part Studio, Assembly, Comment, View/Scan and Export. Next, we identify the degree to which each of the eight designers performs activity in these CAD action groups. We demonstrate the usefulness of this framework by highlighting insights revealed by the CAD action group mapping, confirmed via discussion with the industry partner. This CAD-type behaviour framework provides a tool for assessment and reflection on the types of behavioural tendencies present or missing on a team of designers. It can assist CAD educators and trainees in understanding their comprehensive CAD learning trajectory. Future extensions of the framework could leverage artificial intelligence techniques to provide real-time feedback on designer roles.

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