Rainer Stark – författare

In this book, the authors describe the findings derived from interaction and cooperation between scientific actors employing diverse practices. They reflect on distinct prototyping concepts and examine the transformation of development culture in their fusion to hybrid approaches and solutions.

The products of tomorrow are going to be multifunctional, interactive systems – and already are to some degree today. Collaboration across multiple disciplines is the only way to grasp their complexity in design concepts. This underscores the importance of reconsidering the prototyping process for the development of these systems, particularly in transdisciplinary research teams.

“Rethinking Prototyping – new hybrid concepts for prototyping” was a transdisciplinary project that took up this challenge. The aim of this programmatic rethinking was to come up with a general concept of prototyping by combining innovative prototyping concepts, which had been researched and developed in three sub-projects: “Hybrid Prototyping” developed new prototyping approaches to validate and evaluate holistically developed systems with their services, infrastructure and business models. “Blended Prototyping” addressed a new technique whereby prototypes for user interfaces of software applications can be generated from hand drawings and immediately be tested. “Beyond Prototyping” examined the issue of the prototype in connection with algorithmically generated design for producing

Die Produktentwicklung durchläuft seit den letzten zwei Dekaden einen massiven Wandel, der auch heute weiter anhält. Einflussgrößen auf diesen Wandel sind die zunehmende Integration der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie sowohl in den Entwicklungsprozess als auch in die Produkte selbst, die Verringerung der Entwicklungstiefe bei gleichzeitiger Zunahme der Kooperation zwischen Hersteller und Zulieferanten sowie die voranschreitende und zunehmende Internationalisierung. Gerade die zunehmende Integration von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie in den Produktentwicklungsprozess und in Produkte selbst bewirkt einen Paradigmenwechsel, der den Wandel von einer an Disziplinen orientierten

The collection of papers in this book comprises the proceedings of the 23rd CIRP Design Conference held between March 11th and March 13th 2013 at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. The event was organized in cooperation with the German Academic Society for Product Development – WiGeP. The focus of the conference was  on »Smart Product Engineering«, covering two major aspects of modern  product creation: the development of intelligent (“smart”) products as well as the new (“smart”) approach of engineering, explicitly taking into account consistent systems integration.

Throughout the 97 papers contained in these proceedings, a range of topics are covered, amongst them the different facets and aspects of what makes a product or an engineering solution “smart”. In addition, the conference papers investigate new ways of engineering for production planning and collaboration towards Smart Product Engineering. The publications provide a solid insight into the pressing issues of modern digital product creation facing increasing challenges in a rapidly changing industrial environment. They also give implicit advice how a “smart” product or engineering solution (processes, methods and tools) needs to be designed and implemented in order to become successful.

Today, digital technologies represent an absolute must when it comes to creating new products and factories. However, day-to-day product development and manufacturing engineering operations have still only unlocked roughly fifty percent of the "digital potential". The question is why? This book provides compelling answers and remedies to that question. Its goal is to identify the main strengths and weaknesses of today’s set-up for digital engineering working solutions, and to outline important trends and developments for the future.

The book concentrates on explaining the critical basics of the individual technologies, before going into deeper analysis of the virtual solution interdependencies and guidelines on how to best align them for productive deployment in industrial and collaborative networks. Moreover, it addresses the changes needed in both, technical and management skills, in order to avoid fundamental breakdowns in running information technologies for virtual product creation in the future.