Requirements in Design Processes: Open Issues, Relevance and Implications

Dear Colleagues,

Requirements play a key role in the design process by affecting analysis, synthesis, and evaluation activities at different levels and in different ways.

Specifically, during the analysis of the design problem, requirements are at the cornerstone of designers’ reflection on processes such as formulation and clarification of objectives. Furthermore, requirements guide the process of solution finding, and here, they affect design both positively, by making designers focus on the solution, and negatively, by acting as potential triggers of psychological inertia and fixation. Eventually, during evaluation and selection activities, requirements constitute reference criteria for the assessment of design outcomes in order to identify the solution that is supposedly the most compliant with design objectives.

Therefore, designers’ perspective on requirements and their use relentlessly change along the design process because of mutating detail levels of design representations and differences in terms of information needed to move forward. In the most abstract phases, such as product planning and conceptual design, the designer tries to understand what should be designed and searches for the functions to be delivered and the modalities to implement them. During embodiment and detailed design, the development of the solution progresses until a well-defined structure is identified, which is univocally represented through CAD models and technical drawings. Moreover, due to the iterative nature of the design process, the definition and formulation of requirements is also affected by partial design outcomes, which in turn depend on their own requirements. Therefore, requirements orient the design process by taking into consideration the mutating nature of the design problem without introducing hindrances or leading to dangerous distortions of design objectives. This requires the implementation of strategies to manage and update requirements continuously. In addition, strategies targeting requirements might be tailored to design contexts, such as eco-design or Design for X, or conditions, such as co-design or open innovation.    

The design community has made great efforts to investigate peculiar aspects related to evaluation and selection processes. Conversely, other important issues concerning the whole design process have received less attention—somehow, for example, the big picture has been overlooked. Accordingly, the proposed Special Issue aims to investigate the impact requirements have on the quality and creativity of the design outcomes and the implications of requirement handling in specific design activities, as well as across different phases. More in particular, it welcomes contributions about the main issues summarized in the following, which however should not be considered exhaustive:

• Methods and tools for the definition, understanding, development, use, and management of requirements in the design process. Case studies and comparative analyses in terms of performance of the proposed approaches;
• Criteria and metrics to assess requirement lists;
• Planning R&D strategies through the anticipation of goals, objectives, and requirements;
• Emergence/elicitation, management and evolution of requirements in co-design contexts. Knowledge externalization techniques and tools for problem analysis and goal/objective formalization;
• Role and importance of data and information sources to steer the design process and the definition of requirements therefor (Big Data analysis, Artificial Intelligence, etc.);
• Handling sustainability-oriented requirements in engineering and product design;
• Handling affective, aesthetic, ethical, and emotional requirements in engineering design;
• Requirements in Design for X methods, such as Design for Additive Manufacturing;
• Prototyping requirements in product design and development processes;
• Tools and techniques for overcoming requirement conflicts;
• Impact of requirements on design fixation and on creativity of design outcomes. Role of requirements in the assessment of creative design processes;
• Role and relevance of requirements in stakeholders’ quality evaluation and acceptance of design outcomes;
• Engineering requirements in teaching and education contexts.

Prof. Federico Rotini
Dr. Niccolò Becattini
Dr. Yuri Borgianni
Dr. Lorenzo Fiorineschi
Guest Editors

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