Successful new product development requires the integration of design and engineering, bridging the gap between technological feasibility and user-centric considerations. However, direct ...collaboration between designers and engineers with heterogeneous knowledge presents challenges. In this context, the role of design engineers-professionals skilled in both design and engineering-becomes pivotal. This study categorizes inventors into three primary groups: engineers, designers, and design engineers based on the type of patent applications they hold and investigates their differences in knowledge portfolios and collaboration patterns. The study relies on patent data for 4,665 US publicly-traded firms from 1980 to 2015 from the PATSTAT database, and constructs two networks for each firm period: a social network of inventors and a knowledge network of knowledge elements. Findings show that design engineers are highly connected within the social network but have disconnected knowledge in the knowledge network in comparison to engineers. While design engineers may not be the primary drivers of firms' technological innovations, they facilitate interdisciplinary communication and decision-making, fostering a design-technology integrated new product development environment. This research has practical implications for firms seeking to optimize their innovation processes by creating interdisciplinary teams that harness the complementary strengths of engineers and design engineers.
“Baquelitas y otros plásticos. La Colección Rafael Ortiz”, iniciada hace casi veinte años, ha ido avanzando a medida que su conocimiento se hacía mayor, porque para Rafael Ortiz coleccionar es una ...forma más de aprender. El tiempo y el aprendizaje sobre materiales, objetos y diseñadores le han afinado el ojo y han centrado su interés cada vez más. Lo que comenzó como un simple pasatiempo está en proceso de convertirse en una de las colecciones españolas más importantes de objetos de plástico. En este ensayo, la atención se centra en la colección de radios y en la evolución de los diseñadores
industriales. Diseñadores, marcas y modelos de radio, que se mantienen en la colección, son analizados y valorados como parte del legado del siglo XX.
What should a television look like? How should a dial on a radio feel to the touch? These were questions John Vassos asked when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) asked him to design the first ...mass-produced television receiver, the TRK-12, which had its spectacular premier at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Vassos emigrated from Greece and arrived in the United States in 1918. His career spans the evolution of central forms of mass media in the twentieth century and offers a template for understanding their success. This is Vassos's legacy-shaping the way we interact with our media technologies. Other industrial designers may be more celebrated, but none were more focused on making radio and television attractive and accessible to millions of Americans.
InJohn Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life,Danielle Shapiro is the first to examine the life and work of RCA's key consultant designer through the rise of radio and television and into the computer era. Vassos conceived a vision for the look of new technologies still with us today. A founder of the Industrial Designers Society of America, he was instrumental in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s and into the postwar period. Drawing on unpublished records and correspondence, Shapiro creates a portrait of a designer whose early artistic work in books likePhobiaandContempocritiqued the commercialization of modern life but whose later design work sought to accommodate it.
Replete with rich behind-the-product stories of America's design culture in the 1930s through the 1950s, this volume also chronicles the emergence of what was to become the nation's largest media company and provides a fascinating glimpse into its early corporate culture. In our current era of watching TV on an iPod or a smartphone, Shapiro stimulates broad discussions of the meaning of technological design for mass media in daily life.
Design space is a common abstraction used in the investigation of design cognition. Characteristic properties of design spaces and how they change are underexplored. Design spaces can vary with the ...design task and its constraints, which are assumed to result in differences in neurocognitive processes. We review general cognition, creative cognition and design neurocognition EEG studies. We analyzed the brain activity of 32 professional mechanical engineers and industrial designers while performing constrained and open design tasks. The neurophysiological activations during reading the task, earliest reaction, and open externalization stages of constrained and open design are compared based on EEG frequency band power. Significant differences between constrained and open design for the beta bands were found in the earliest reaction stage. Significant differences between constrained and open design for alpha 2 and the beta bands were found in the open externalization stage. We discuss the results and relate the higher brain activity and significant differences in open design to cognitive functions of interest to design cognition. We show that EEG brain activation is sensitive to the level of constraints in designing, in particular alpha 2 and beta bands can act as proxies of the change and expansion of design spaces.
Store flyers are still one of the most important marketing communication tools used by retailers to promote new products, announce new stores, and communicate special offers. Considering the ...important budget share of store flyers as a promotional tool in retailing, retailers and academics want to understand how their design influences consumers’ behavior and retailers’ performance. This study investigated the influence of store flyer design on the intentions to visit the store and buy. We also investigated the intention to buy a store brand and how the consumer’s perceived variety of the retailer’s assortment and perceived store image moderate such decisions. A fictitious flyer including real national brands and a fictitious store brand was created for a fictitious supermarket. Our methods included a half-factorial laboratory experiment and the analysis of moderator variables. The results suggest that shorter flyers (containing eight pages) have the strongest impact on the evaluated consumer’s decisions. Store perceived variety and perceived image positively affected the relationship between flyer design and the dependent variables.
Born in Paris in 1893 and trained as an engineer, Raymond Loewy revolutionized twentieth-century American industrial design. Combining salesmanship and media savvy, he created bright, smooth, and ...colorful logos for major corporations that included Greyhound, Exxon, and Nabisco. His designs for Studebaker automobiles, Sears Coldspot refrigerators, Lucky Strike cigarette packs, and Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives are iconic. Beyond his timeless designs, Loewy carefully built an international reputation through the assiduous courting of journalists and tastemakers to become the face of both a new profession and a consumer-driven vision of the American dream. In Streamliner , John Wall traces the evolution of an industry through the lens of Loewy’s eclectic life, distinctive work, and invented persona. How, he asks, did Loewy build a business while transforming himself into a national brand a half century before branding became relevant? Placing Loewy in context with the emerging consumer culture of the latter half of the twentieth century, Wall explores how his approach to business complemented—or differed—from that of his well-known contemporaries, including industrial designers Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Teague, and Norman Bel Geddes. Wall also reveals how Loewy tailored his lifestyle to cement the image of designer in the public imagination, and why the self-promotion that drove Loewy to the top of his profession began to work against him at the end of his career. Streamliner is an important and engaging work on one of the longest-lived careers in industrial design.
Abstract
This paper presents results from an experiment using electroencephalography to measure neurophysiological activations of mechanical engineers and industrial designers when designing and ...problem-solving. In this study, we adopted and then extended the tasks described in a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging study reported in the literature. The block experiment consists of a sequence of three tasks: problem-solving, basic design and open design using a physical interface. The block is preceded by a familiarizing pre-task and then extended to a fourth open design task using free-hand sketching. This paper presents the neurophysiological results from 36 experimental sessions of mechanical engineers and industrial designers. Results indicate significant differences in activations between the problem-solving and the open design tasks. The paper focuses on the two prototypical tasks of problem-solving layout and open design sketching and presents results for both aggregate and temporal activations across participants within each domain and across domains.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between several aspects of store flyers design (presence of a institutional slogan, type of product (national brand (NB) or store ...brand (SB)) featured on the cover page, the size of the flyer, number of featured NBs, type of brand (NB vs SB) on promotion, and price difference between the most expensive (NB) and the cheapest SB) and the consumer’s perceived variety of the retailer’s assortment, as a dimension of its global image.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed laboratory experiment that combined a between-subjects experimental design and inter-subject conjoint analysis was conducted. A fictitious flyer from a fictitious supermarket was created that included both real NBs and fictitious SBs. In total, 12 scenarios (i.e. flyers) were tested using a sample of 406 participants.
Findings
Analysis suggests that longer flyers have the greatest influence on consumers’ perceived variety of a retailer’s assortment; a greater number of NBs in a category influenced consumers’ perceptions positively, and featuring SBs on the cover enhanced perceived variety. If a retailer features SBs on a flyer’s cover, longer flyers are recommended, and shorter flyers are recommended if NBs are featured on the cover. A retailer should promote its own brand only if the most expensive NBs are featured with SBs.
Research limitations/implications
This study analyses a single aspect of consumers’ purchasing behaviors – variety of a retailer’s assortment. Future research should examine other variables related to consumers’ purchasing behaviors. This study uses an online context to test hypotheses, but many aspects of flyer design are physical. Future research should test current findings in offline contexts to compare results. Research should also explore moderation by consumer variables such as brand and store loyalty.
Practical implications
To researchers, the authors offer improved understanding of how a flyer’s design affects the first stage of purchasing. To practitioners, results offer better understanding of positive returns on investment of store flyers, and to retailers, results offer a guide to creating and organizing flyers.
Originality/value
This study is first to assess how a flyer’s design influences a dimension of store image. Unlike extant research that examines store flyers using econometric models at the aggregate level, this study uses a laboratory experiment that combines a between-subjects design with conjoint analysis.
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