It has been acknowledged that global challenges are in the way of delivering responsible innovation, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals – a set of strategic objectives formulated by the United Nations General Assembly, to promote environmentally, societally, and economically-sustainable development. Design higher education has an important role to play in equipping the next generation of professionals with knowledge and skills for tackling pressing system-level challenges. Sustainable design research and ways of integrating emerging technologies in future design higher education curricula have, separately, attracted significant interest in recent years. However, comparatively little effort has concentrated on the role that a broader range of technologies can play in shaping the design higher education provision with system-level sustainability challenges in mind. This article presents an analysis of 180 Design MSc dissertation projects, implemented at a UK higher education institution between 2019 and 2022, focusing on research challenges of societal and industrial relevance. The data set includes a mapping of dissertation projects to relevant technologies, industry sectors, and Sustainable Development Goals. Data analysis suggests a balanced distribution of projects across a range of sustainability goals, although under-represented thematic areas have also been highlighted. The methods adopted for this study, based on a systematic study of relational patterns reflecting associations of dissertation projects with technologies, industry sectors, and sustainability goals, provide a blueprint for future data-driven research on the role played by technologies within student projects in design higher education, with an emphasis on their relevance to sustainable innovation challenges.

The research problems addressed in this article pertain to the limited understanding and insufficient availability of digital storytelling guidelines for elderly and physically impaired individuals in museum presentations. The objective of this review is to explore digital storytelling guidelines along with the latest technology in museums catering to older adults and those with mobility impairments. This literature review included databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, covering the period from 2000 to 2023. Researchers comprehensively examined and employed content analysis to categorize all papers into three primary themes: (1) inclusive design for museum presentations; (2) trends in technology for digital storytelling in museum presentations; (3) guidelines for digital storytelling in museum presentations. This review article could enhance understanding and promote diversity, accessibility, and motivation among two specific groups of museum visitors, both onsite and online.

Combining Design Fiction with participatory design principles has been shown to improve the role of participants, from research subjects to research partners. By supporting the process with futuristic and strategic thinking tools, participants can become experts in their own experience. This research project explores how Extended Reality technologies can be integrated as a design tool in design education. In this paper, a methodology of using participatory design fiction to engage design students in speculating the future of design education in the context of emerging technologies is presented. A three-part workshop was conducted, which involved 68 Design MSc students. A total of 17 "actionable" future scenarios of design education in the context of emerging technologies were proposed at the end of the workshop. This paper focuses on one of the workshop activities, Sequential Backcasting and What If cards, and provided a preliminary thematic analysis of the results. This study contributes to the development of participatory design methodologies and offers insights into the potential role of Extended Reality technologies in design education.

This article aims to review and identify key challenges and opportunities in the interrelationship between cultural tourism, inclusive design, and digital storytelling fields. The literature review included searching Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar for three main field keywords, drawing 421 articles between 1990 and 2022. Content analysis was applied to literature findings and five categories with twenty-three themes emerged accordingly: (1) issues in cultural tourism; (2) diversity in museums; (3) inclusive design in museums; (4) motivation in museums; and (5) digital storytelling in museums. The article further discusses the nuanced relationship between these three fields and proposes an initial framework to help future growth of cultural tourism through increasing visitors’ motivation and diversity. As such, the work aims to facilitate cultural tourism as an activity that better reflects the diversity of its potential audiences and proactively addresses their needs, requirements and interests.

In common with many industries, the audiovisual sector is likely to be transformed by real-time graphic engines in combination with immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. This technological mix enables what is presently known as Virtual Production, introducing a new process to the audiovisual professional, capable of fostering creativity, collaboration, and decision making, while at the same time increasing efficiency. The potential for Virtual Production to transform workflows and creative processes within large-scale productions in the audiovisual sector is significant and includes the prospective introduction of new capabilities for remote co-creation of content. However, barriers to democratisation need to be overcome, particularly in relation to adoption of the technology by small and medium independent productions that generally have limited access to resources and technical knowledge. Following an extensive study of the current literature and involvement in the research of professionals working in the field through online interviews, this article documents a first step towards filling this gap by investigating Virtual Production adoption scenarios for small and medium independent productions. The primary aim is to design intuitive, engaging, and effective solutions to address the needs of Directors, Cinematographers, and Producers. Thanks to the valuable time and experience of industry professionals, this study has gathered user requirements for a Virtual Production design solution capable of facilitating location scouting and pre-production. A novel framework for remote exploration of target locations within immersive environments, co-created with relevant stakeholders, is presented to lay the foundations of future co-design work.

The majority of young tourists are not interested in museums since most presentations do not make a connection with this group. Moreover, most digital storytelling presentation guidelines are created based on expert recommendations, and not on audience perspectives and needs. Hence, the aim of this research is to cocreate and propose a digital storytelling presentation guideline including both experts' and audiences' views to motivate young tourists to engage in museums. For experts' recommendations, seventeen face-to-face interviews were conducted. For audiences' views, thirty- seven interviews were set up to understand what they really need. As a result, this study creates nine factors for digital storytelling presentation guidelines for museums. The value of this guideline is to propose: (1) on-site presentations at the museums; (2) virtual online presentations; and (3) short presentations to attract prospective tourists to come to museums.

Virtual Production is a new process in the audiovisual industry, taking advantage of emerging technologies and attracting a significant degree of interest in academic and industrial research. This article documents a research process focusing on co-design of innovative solutions for Virtual Production relying on immersive technologies. Two remote collaborative workshops were organized involving audiovisual professionals covering different roles in different phases of the making process of audiovisual production. A range of innovative design concepts was generated as part of the research following group-based iterative discussion and evaluation. The study has contributed a set of innovative design solutions in relation to applications of immersive technologies in the audiovisual industry. The authors argue that the methods adopted have the potential to serve as a blueprint for design and implementation of future remote collaborative co-design processes in relation to audiovisual studies and, more generally, across disciplinary boundaries.

Using new and emerging technologies in education can increase student engagement and support teaching methods. However, using any technological tool requires prior knowledge and understanding, especially in education. An online survey was used to gather data on product design students' knowledge of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. As a case study, this survey will examine how the use of Virtual Reality technology can impact the product design development process and design thinking. A questionnaire was distributed to product design students as part of a mixed method approach. Students' views on common design solution development practices and Virtual Reality technology were quantified and analysed through open-ended and closed-ended questions. The survey revealed students' preferred modelling and rendering software, sketching methods, level of detail in sketches, prototyping materials and tools, assessment modes and aspects. The questionnaire also assessed students' knowledge of VR and their perceptions of its utility in product design. In product/industrial design education, high student awareness of technology indicates a bright future.

Plastic in the linear consumption model is frequently manufactured and disposed of, leading to the creation of excessive plastic waste, which has significant consequences for the environment. Single-use food packaging waste is a large constituent of plastic waste that needs to be addressed urgently. The implementation of reusable packaging systems (RPSs) to close the loop of consumption appears to be promising, but the insights into consumers’ willingness to accept them are limited. This research investigates the aspect of consumers’ adoption of RPSs by identifying the particular user acceptance issues and eventually providing a set of design recommendations to address them. The data collection methods are remote interviews, engaging with 42 participants in three iterations, to evaluate three user experiences of RPSs in order to identify the user acceptance issues. After the user acceptance issues are identified in each iteration, the Theory of Attitude-Behaviour-Context is employed to advance the understanding of the acceptance issues. In order to continuously refine the user experiences, insights from design for sustainable behaviour are applied to address the user acceptance issues. The research results include three refined user experiences, four user acceptance issues—namely hygiene, usability, finance and motivation—and design recommendations to address those user acceptance issues. This research may be of interest to packaging professionals, and could be used to design and refine the RPSs to induce consumers’ adoption.

Environmental sustainability is under the threat of excessive single‐use plastic packaging waste, which current waste management fails to address. Therefore, the issue has led to an identification of the solution that can curb packaging waste without sacrificing social needs.Reusable packaging systems (RPSs) represent a circular approach to close the loop of consumption in which packaging can stay longer in the system to satisfy social needs. However, the implementation of reusable packaging is limited. Product–service systems (PSSs) are widely regarded as a sustainable business model innovation for embracing circular consumption. As a result, applying PSSs to RPSs should be promising in addressing the packaging waste issue. Even so, there is limited knowledge regarding adopting this approach to address the packaging crisis. This paper explores how to apply PSSs to RPSs to support professionals in addressing the packaging crisis in the food and household products industry.The methodology of this paper is a combination of case studies and expert interviews. Fifty‐seven case studies are collected, analyzed, and formulated into 15 archetypal models that represent all types of RPSs in the current market. In parallel, a classification is developed to embrace those 15 archetypal models, and a total of 24 experts—packaging consultants, NGO professionals who address plastic waste, and reusable packaging entrepreneurs—were invited for the evaluation of the design tool.This research provides a strategic design tool to support packaging professionals to design RPSs. The application of the tool is to support understanding RPSs, analyzing the markets, and identifying new opportunities, and to generate RPSs. The implication of this research is to provide insights for academics and businesses in terms of tackling single‐use packaging waste and to build a foundation to further develop the design tool for generating RPSs.

Rail traffic in passenger miles [in the UK] is projected to increase by 100% over the next 30 years, which presents a considerable challenge for the current infrastructure to perform the regular fluid servicing tasks. Developing robotic autonomous systems for train fluid servicing is a prospect for which no solutions currently exist. Therefore, the economic and technical feasibility of a robotic autonomous system to perform several key fluid servicing tasks on passenger train vehicles is investigated. The fluid servicing tasks chosen include those that to a significant degree are repetitive or hazardous for humans to perform, and therefore if performed by a robotic autonomous system will release service personnel to focus on more suitable tasks. The economic and technical cases presented strongly support the use of a robotic autonomous system for fluid servicing of trains. Generally available robotic autonomous system technology has reached a state of development capable of delivering what is required once reliable couplings and fluid hose technologies have been developed for this application. Overall, the findings are that fluid servicing capacity will at least double for around 15% of the cost of an equivalent manual servicing facility, which represents a substantially attractive business case. There will be modest technical challenges to be overcome that will add unknown cost elements such as modifications to vehicle fluid ports for robotic autonomous system compatibility and development of long power hoses.

Product-Service Systems (PSS), if properly designed and implemented, represent a promising approach to sustainability. However, there is a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder the widespread PSS implementation. In this paper, the authors investigated Distributed Manufacturing (DM) as a promising production model which can be applied to PSS to address some of its implementation barriers and improve its sustainability. To that end, existing PSS implementation barriers were collected and coupled with systematically analysed favourable DM features to describe a set of PSS+DM near-future scenarios, addressing the complete PSS lifecycle. Scenarios were then integrated into the PSS+DM Design Tool aiming to support idea generation for PSS implementation. The tool was tested with students, PSS and/or DM experts, manufacturing companies and design practitioners through two rounds of workshops in order to evaluate its completeness, effectiveness and usability and define recommendations for improvements. Based on the results, the improved final version of the PSS+DM Design Tool was developed, presenting the potential to support idea generation to improve sustainable PSS implementation through integrating DM features in each PSS lifecycle stage.

A flexible coaxial fibre supercapacitor based on ball-milled activated carbon nanoparticles mixed with pen ink as electrode materials was successfully fabricated. With the ball-milling time prolonging, the size distribution of the activated carbon particles became gradually narrowed and the average particle size decreased into tens of nanometres from tens of microns, and some Fe2O3 phases were introduced. The specific capacitance of the ball-milled activated carbons improved. Furthermore, an activated carbon ball-milled for 24 h with a higher specific capacitance was selected to mix with commercial ink in a ratio of 1:20 to prepare a new active material for high-performance coaxial fibre supercapacitors. Consequently, the specific capacitance for the fibre supercapacitor reached 14.5 mF cm−1, which was 16 times more than that using commercial ink alone as the active layer material, and four times than that using ink mixed with the original activated carbon.

Patent infringement detection usually implies research among documents in different forms, in both natural and unstructured language, often involving a lot of human resources and time. In order to ease this patent check process, we previously presented a visual tool to be used by designers themselves at any stage of the design process, providing them with useful and reliable information for deciding whether to steer their design away from potential patent infringements. In this work, we report on a usability study carried out on such a tool with 21 professional designers from industry in the field of mechanical engineering. The outcome of our study shows that our tool is very well accepted by designers, and felt useful and helpful even by legal experts.

This review paper discusses the trends and projections for wearable technology in the consumer sports sector (excluding professional sport). Analyzing the role of wearable technology for different users and why there is such a need for these devices in everyday lives. It shows how different sensors are influential in delivering a variety of readings that are useful in many ways regarding sport attributes. Wearables are increasing in function, and through integrating technology, users are gathering more data about themselves. The amount of wearable technology available is broad, each having its own role to play in different industries. Inertial measuring unit (IMU) and Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors are predominantly present in sport wearables but can be programmed for different needs. In this review, the differences are displayed to show which sensors are compatible and which ones can evolve sensor technology for sport applications.

The Product-Service System (PSS) concept is considered a promising type of business models that has the potential to couple social, economic and environmental sustainability. However, there are a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder a wide PSS implementation. The research hypothesis of this paper is that Distributed Manufacturing (DM), described as a network of localised and customer-oriented production units, can be applied to PSS to address some of the previously mentioned barriers. In order to understand to what extent DM can improve PSS implementation, existing PSS barriers were gathered and coupled with collected potential DM opportunities. Most promising pairings were described in a set of near-future scenarios which were later integrated into the first version of the PSS+DM design tool. The first testing of the tool was carried out with 45 design students and initial findings suggest that, with further improvements, the PSS+DM design tool has the potential to support PSS solutions development process.

Functionally Graded Additive Manufacturing (FGAM) is a layer-by-layer fabrication process that involves gradationally varying the material organisation within a component to achieve an intended function. FGAM establishes a radical shift from contour modelling to performance modelling by having the performance-driven functionality built directly into the material. FGAM can strategically control the density and porosity of the composition or can combine distinct materials to produce a seamless monolithic structure. This paper presents a state-of-art conceptual understanding of FGAM, covering an overview of current techniques that can enable the production of FGAM parts as well as identify current technological limitations and challenges. The possible strategies for overcoming those barriers are presented and recommendations on future design opportunities are discussed.