Contents

#### **Preface XI**



Preface

set of three case studies.

sign, professional initiation and visual and material culture.

A fast paced changing world requires dynamic methods and robust theories to enable designers to deal with the changing product development landscape successfully and hence make a difference in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Designers continue stretching the boun‐ daries of their discipline, and trail new paths in interdisciplinary domains, constantly moving the frontiers of their practice farther ahead. This book, following Industrial Design – New Frontiers, also published by InTech, develops the concepts present in the previous book further, as well as reaching new areas of theory and practice in industrial design and in industrial design engineering. The eleven chapters in this book report on the novel frontiers of the current era of industrial de‐ sign, in some cases going over those frontiers to look at how neighbouring disciplines tackle shared problems. Design process innovation, industrial design perspectives and sustainability are the overarching themes of each of the first three parts of the book, while the last part contains a

The first part of the book, focusing on innovations in the design process, looks at bionic design as a two-way approach, at design thinking in conceptual approaches, at product sound design and at the theory of inventive problem solving. The design of product instructions and simplicity in design are the two industrial design perspectives covered in the second part. The topic of sustain‐ ability is the major theme of the third part of the book, focusing on the sustainability of product innovation and providing a sustainability perspective on toy design methods. A set of case stud‐ ies makes up the fourth and last part of this book. These include the domain of automotive de‐

The encompassing contents and the diversity of the chapters is bound to entice readers and help them reach new insights on how to advance both their practice and their research on the domain of product design for industrial manufacture and industrial design in general. The book is struc‐ tured and written so that a layperson, or a student, may quickly grasp the contours of the domain and decide whether to go deeper in one particular subject or application domain. Whatever the initial stance of the reader, we hope that this book may be of value in advancing the understand‐

**Professor Denis A. Coelho**

University of Beira Interior,

Covilhã, Portugal

Human Technology Group (Director)

Dept. Electromechanical Engineering,

Masters Program in Industrial Design Engineering (Coordinator) Product Development and Prototyping Laboratory (Head)

ing of some of the most prominent of the current challenges in this fascinating field.
