Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing

Special Issue: Call For Papers



AIEDAM Special Issue, Spring 2013, Vol.27, No.2

Studying and Supporting Design Communication

Edited by: Maaike Kleinsmann & Anja Maier

Communication is an essential part of any design process, and problems in design communication can lead to delays, mistakes and even the ultimate failure of projects. Design communication is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon to study. It is about products and services that may or may not yet exist and includes abstraction to possible future situations. Communication can be formal or informal. It can, for example, happen at the same time (synchronously) or at different times (asynchronously) and it has different directions, such as from manager to designer (top-down), from designer to manager (bottom-up), between designers, and between designers and the users. Transmitted information can take many different forms. It can be spoken, written or drawn and can be sent and received using different media. Further, a designer might work alone. More likely, however, the design process is executed in large teams with members from differing backgrounds.

This special issue encourages investigation of a number of focus areas, including:

  • Design communication during different design stages of the product
  • Design communication in different situations, e.g. critical situations
  • Interface communication (between a product and a designer, between designers, between design teams, between companies, between designers and society as a whole)
  • Organisation of a design team to enable adequate communication, e.g. the impact of team diversity, remote or co-located teams on the design process
  • Emergence of shared understanding through design communication
  • Communication patterns in design meetings
  • The impact of affective design communication on the design process
  • The nature of informal and formal communication in the design process
  • Visualization of design rationale as design communication
  • Interpretation of intent from sketches and other forms of representation
  • Using artefacts, such as drawings and prototypes as media in the design process
  • The role and importance of the shape of products, e.g. product language
  • Understanding and supporting information requirements of a design engineer
  • Multimodal design communication
  • The future of design communication in practice and research into design communication

In investigating the topics listed above, we often draw on insights and use methods from a number of scholarly disciplines to frame the phenomenon observed, to analyze our findings and draw our conclusions. Conscious or not, explicit or not, we as design researchers view the subject matter from a certain disciplinary angle. Perhaps we even use several. Ideally, the authors of this special issue will draw out the angle chosen and make its applicability and usefulness to design practice and research explicit.

We welcome papers that are empirical, conceptual, theoretical, or speculative.

  • Papers that are empirical perhaps report on practice of communication in design, using field studies or experiments.
  • Papers that are conceptual in nature might reflect on existing discussions in the literature.
  • Papers that are theory-driven for instance explore one perspective or create an in-depth comparison between different theories of communication and their application to designing products.
  • Papers that are more speculative might describe the nature and future of design communication.

Together, the papers are intended to show an overview of the field(s) of research that contributes to the study of communication in design.

All submissions will be anonymously reviewed by at least three reviewers. The selection for publication will be made on the basis of these reviews. High quality papers not selected for this special issue may be considered for standard publication in AIEDAM.

Information about the format and style required for AIEDAM papers can be found at www.cs.wpi.edu/~aiedam/Instructions/. Papers should be less than 40 double-spaced pages, including figures and tables.

Note that all enquiries and submissions for special issues go to the Guest Editors, and not to the Editor in Chief.

Important dates (Revised):

    Expression of interest (abstract & title): Before 31 January 2011 Submission deadline for full papers: 15 September 2011 NEW DEADLINE Reviews due: 15 December 2011 Notification and reviews to authors: 1 February 2012 Revised version submission deadline: 15 May 2012 Submission of camera-ready version: 15 October 2012 Issue to publisher: 8 December 2012

Guest editors:

Dr. Maaike Kleinsmann
Department of Product Innovation Management
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
Delft University of Technology
Landbergstraat 15, 2628CE Delft
The Netherlands
Email: M.S.Kleinsmann @ tudelft.nl

Dr. Anja Maier
Department of Management Engineering
Technical University of Denmark
Produktionstorvet, Building 425
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
Email: amai @ man.dtu.dk


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Mon Jul 4 16:05:55 EDT 2011