Advantageous application of synthetic environments in product design

Despite the abundance of supporting tools and methods engineers have at their disposal nowadays, the early stages of design processes are still not extensively supported. Strikingly, the whole of design aids is characterized by mono-disciplinarity, scattered availability and the fact that the majority aims to support the later design stages. We believe that the next step in design engineering is to support the early design stages with a method that integrates the available aids and allows stakeholders to experience the consequences of the design decisions they make. This can be done by composing Synthetic Environments (SE). In companies, Synthetic Environments will be used as dedicated work environments that support specific product design activities. By simulating the in-context behaviour of products that do not yet exist they support the performance of selected design activities. Representation of different product life-cycle scenarios in Mixed Reality situations will help human actors perceive the product behaviour sufficiently realistic to perform real-world design tasks (e.g. brainstorming, concept assessment, end-user evaluation) on a virtual product. We aim to demonstrate how and under which circumstances companies will be able to benefit from SE in the near future. In close cooperation with three industrial partners (Indes, Thales and PANalytical), we define a method for identifying plausible application situations in a product evolution trajectory.