Conference Agenda

While Immersive Reality (XR) design tools continue to emerge, the industry perspective on their value is unclear. This paper presents outputs of a workshop with 16 design experts testing a wide range of XR design tools. Value exceeding that of traditional tools was reported, driven by human-centric affordances like flexibility, interactivity, and response rate. Perceived detriments were linked to implementation challenges, such as fidelity and skill. Findings validate XR's potential in design and direct future work towards overcoming key technical hurdles to unlock its value.

This study presents a lean experimental method for investigating Proofs of Concept (PoCs) in early product development. By adapting and extending Design of Experiments (DoE) with complementary frameworks, the method enables efficient identification of minimal functional parameter sets. Based on a cube-oriented model and iterative one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) testing, the design space is systematically refined. Experimental validation on a smart shaft–hub connection demonstrates the method’s effectiveness in reducing required samples while ensuring feasibility.

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) fix and connect electrical components and are widely used. Current design methods emphasise mature products and do not leverage the potential of PCBs as prototyping tools. Accordingly, an alternative approach using PCBs for prototyping electrical and mechatronic solutions is evaluated through three case studies. Insights formed five concrete recommendations for designers: Increase fidelity deliberately, design for prototyping, iterate incrementally, parallelise prototyping, and prototype and test early. These aim to make prototyping with PCBs more accessible.

This paper evaluates the criticality assessment within the Criticality-Based Planning of Prototype Sequences method. Two independent application studies investigate whether the existing scale definitions for novelty, technical difficulty and importance are sufficient for systematic and context-independent use. The results show that operationalised criteria and clearer evaluator guidance significantly improve consistency, reproducibility and applicability across different development projects.