Publications related to Design thinking

Co-Design Optimisation of Morphing Topology and Control of Winged Drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Fabio Bergonti

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient solution. However, m ...

IEEE2024

Strategy to systematically design and deploy the ITER plasma control system: A system engineering and model-based design approach

Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici, Richard Pitts, Federico Pesamosca, Anna Ngoc Minh Trang Vu

The paper details the process of developing the ITER Plasma Control System (PCS), that is, how to design and deploy it systematically, in the most efficient and effective manner. The integrated nature of the ITER PCS, with its multitude of coupled control ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Electromagnetic Radiation of Implantable Antennas

Mingxiang Gao

In the development of implantable bioelectronics, the establishment of efficient wireless RF links between implants and external nodes is crucial, providing substantial contributions to the advancement of medical diagnosis, therapies, and basic science. Im ...

EPFL2024

Digital Intervention for Collaborative and Human-Centered Activities in Design-Based Learning Scenarios

Denis Gillet, Isabelle Barbara Marie-Hélène Cardia

Training science and engineering students to become responsible citizens and professionals requires novel and creative pedagogical approaches, such as design thinking. This concept relies on processes and tools to develop creativity and problem-solving ski ...

IEEE2023

What Role Do Tangibles Play in Fostering Design Thinking Skills? An Exploratory Study

Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Yousef Jalali, Natascia Petringa, Mary Jean Bürer

Despite the importance of using artifacts during the design thinking process, there is a limited understanding of the influence of tangibles with lower perceptual richness on design thinking skills within educational settings. It is speculated that tangibl ...

2023

Sustainability and Ethicality are Peripheral to Students’ Software Design

Bryan Alexander Ford, Siara Ruth Isaac, Pierluca Borsò, Aditi Kothiyal

The conceptual design phase is a fascinating moment to observe how a design task is interpreted, as the (often implicit) relative importance students accord to the various requirements and constraints offers a window into the thinking underpinning their de ...

Tempus Publications2023

Computational design and additive manufacturing of electromagnetic coils

Adrien Jean-Michel Thabuis

The modern world is heavily reliant on electromagnetic devices to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy and vice versa. These devices are fundamental to powering our society, and the growing need for automated production lines and electrified tr ...

EPFL2023

MultiModN- Multimodal, Multi-Task, Interpretable Modular Networks

Martin Jaggi, Mary-Anne Hartley, Vinitra Swamy, Thierry Bossy, Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Thijs Vogels, Malika Satayeva, Jibril Albachir Frej

Predicting multiple real-world tasks in a single model often requires a particularly diverse feature space. Multimodal (MM) models aim to extract the synergistic predictive potential of multiple data types to create a shared feature space with aligned sema ...

2023

Interactive design with optimum matchmaking of reused structural elements – a software implementation

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Jonas Warmuth, Jan Friedrich Georg Brütting

Structural systems are a significant contributor to buildings’ embodied carbon and reusing structural elements in new load-bearing applications is one strategy to reduce this impact. However, integrating this approach into existing design workflows without ...

International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS)2023

From the Cloud to Agbogbloshie: The Case of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform and Akwasi Bediako Afrane’s TRONS

This contribution sheds light on discarded electronics repair in Accra, Ghana. After placing these practices in dialogue with the Western and Eurocentric narratives around the materiality of digital interactions and infrastructure, it delves into two arts ...

2023

Carbon budgets at the component scale and their impacts on design choices: the façade as a case study

Marilyne Andersen, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme, Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

In accordance with the Paris agreement, the Swiss Climate Strategy (SCS) defines the net-zero target to be reached before 2050, which demands for a thoughtful carbon budget allocation between the different contributors. Ongoing normalization tasks are curr ...

2023

Smart acoustic lining for UHBR technologies engine: from the design of an electroacoustic metasurface to experimental characterization under flow

Hervé Lissek, Maxime Volery

The SALUTE project aims at evaluating performance of electroacoustic metasurface, employing a surface array of controlled electroacoustic actuators, for smart acoustic lining under grazing turbulent flow to be used in UHBR Technologies Engines. Theoretical ...

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)2023

Reinforcement Learning for Joint Design and Control of Battery-PV Systems

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Laure-Emmanuelle Perret Aebi, Marine Dominique Cauz

The decentralisation and unpredictability of new renewable energy sources require rethinking our energy system. Data-driven approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL), have emerged as new control strategies for operating these systems, but they have n ...

2023

Dissipative Embedded Column Bases for Enhanced Seismic Performance of Steel Moment Resisting Frames

Dimitrios Lignos, Albano António De Abreu E Presa De Castro E Sousa, Hiroyuki Inamasu

This paper presents an innovative design concept for embedded column base (ECB) connections. The developed ECB connection achieves a non-degrading hysteretic response. In the proposed ECB connections, the dissipative zone is shifted into the embedded porti ...

EEME2023

Fashioning the Future: Unlocking the Creative Potential of Deep Generative Models for Design Space Exploration

Pierre Dillenbourg, Richard Lee Davis, Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Kevin Gonyop Kim, Thiemo Wambsganss, Wei Jiang

This paper investigates the potential impact of deep generative models on the work of creative professionals, specifically focusing on fashion design. We argue that current generative modeling tools lack critical features that would make them useful creati ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Mixplorer: Scaffolding Design Space Exploration through Genetic Recombination of Multiple Peoples’ Designs to Support Novices’ Creativity

Pierre Dillenbourg, Richard Lee Davis, Kevin Gonyop Kim

The ability to consider a wide range of solutions to a design problem is a crucial skill for designers, and is a major differentiator between experts and novices. One reason for this is that novices are unaware of the full extent of the design space in whi ...

2022

Design of a low-loss hybrid silicon-organic terahertz field detector

Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus, Alessandro Tomasino, Francesco Bertot

We propose an innovative design for an integrated, low-loss on-chip terahertz (THz) field detector based on hybrid silicon-organic slot waveguides and THz antennas. We perform a numerical study of the dependency of electro-optic interaction on geometrical ...

IEEE2022

SiGe Time Resolving Pixel Detectors for High Energy Physics and Medical Imaging

Fulvio Martinelli

In the last years, sub-nanosecond time-resolved particle detectors have been object of research by many companies and institutes since they represent an efficient tool to improve the performance of detecting systems for various applications such as High En ...

EPFL2022

Policy-based Exploration of Equilibrium Representations (PEER): A topology grammar for generative conceptual structural design

Ioannis Mirtsopoulos

Design exploration is a creative process that consists of the incremental generation of design candidates. Supported by digital means or not, the process handles the ill-structured nature of design and allows creativity to flourish through diversity of des ...

EPFL2022

A Noise-Resistant Mixed-Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Automatic Design of Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann

The automatic design of well-performing robotic controllers is still an unsolved problem due to the inherently large parameter space and noisy, often hard-to-define performance metrics, especially when sequential tasks need to be accomplished. Distal contr ...

2022