Design by analogy, in which designers draw inspiration from cross-domain design solutions, is a promising methodology for product development. This work attempts to leverage the existing design solutions within a repository, combined with an exploration of inherent structural forms that can be discovered based on the content and similarity of that data, in order to gain useful insights into the...

Increasingly shorter product life cycles impel rms to design, develop, and market more products in less time than ever before. Overlapping of design and development stages is commonly regarded as the most promising strategy to reduce product development times. However, overlapping typically requires additional resources and can be costly. Our research addresses the trade-o) between product deve...

The experience reflected in these patterns comes from years of working for an international technology company with product development centers in Europe, North America and Asia, and through interaction with people from other companies practicing distributed development. The patterns were initially built on observing internally established practices, and later influenced by learning through rea...

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a powerful tool for teaching that helps students to get the best out of their effort in terms of the learning results obtained, even more in studies like university degree studies in engineering. A way of getting even more of this is by means of the adaptation of methodologies from different knowledge areas, because this allows the launch of innovative ways of wo...

Product development has increasingly become a cooperative endeavor that requires effective coordination in the face of highly complex inter-dependencies exposed by distribution over participants, time and perspectives. Distinct coordination support technologies have emerged for each of these kinds of distribution, but all face important limitations. This paper presents an integrated model of co...

Many impact assessment methods use weighing factors to agregate the different environmental effects into a single score value for the total impact caused by a product life cycle. The introduction of subjectivity in the decision process during product development, by using this kind of weighting factors, should be avoided. A more objective approach uses indicators based on laws of physics, for e...