Challenges when working with renewable materials: knocking on wood?

ABSTRACT

With sustainable design as a vital strategical component for companies competing on the market today, many companies will need to transition to a use of sustainable and/or renewable materials in the near future. But how can this be done, and what can be done to bridge the gap from current affairs to a new, more sustainable state? Looking towards industries with experience might help making the first step just a little bit easier. This study aims to find challenges and bottlenecks when working with sustainable materials, in order to help companies interested in transitioning towards using sustainable or renewable materials in their products. The paper describes an interview study with five Swedish wood industry companies, differentiated in size and products, where the authors identify several key findings for both industry (already working with wood or aiming at transitioning towards renewable materials) and academia (on using renewable materials, need for further research, and pointers for teaching design and engineering students). Findings range from how organisational culture affects material selection, to how flexibility and efficiency effects automation solutions via how these companies have approached outsourcing of parts of their production.

KEYWORDS:

• Wood industry
• material selection
• product development
• product design
• production flexibility

1. Background

Since sustainability is a major concern with industry today, sustainable design is vital for companies wanting to compete on a more conscious and informed market. Decisions made early in the design and product development process have a significant impact on product performance and cost (Lindahl 2005), and it is recommended that sustainability efforts are introduced early and proactively in the design and product development process (Ritzén 2000). This means that a conscious effort to introduce sustainable design is crucial for reaching sustainability in a product-producing company. Circularity, material sourcing and renewable resources are critical components in future strategies for companies, whatever product segment they are competing in (Ritzén 2000; Cayzer, Griffiths, and Beghetto 2017).

With this sustainability in focus, industries working with renewable materials are especially interesting when looking at understanding the relationship between design, product development and production in a sustainable system: how is the product realisation process done when your work is based on renewable materials? What is done that perhaps can be of use for other industries transitioning to sustainable and renewable materials? What can be learned from these industries already working with renewable materials, so that industries transitioning to renewable materials can do this quicker, more efficiently and with less risk for project failure? Using the experience from industries that have transitioned or partly transitioned into working with sustainable and renewable materials could aid other industries finding challenges and bottlenecks for a transition and thus reduce the time and cost of becoming more sustainable. This type of learning from other´s experience could make the system change easier to implement.

One of the industries already working with renewable materials is the wood industry, hereby defined as the industry sector working with refinement of wood from cut raw material into products, not including the paper and pulp segments. The Swedish wood industry is a sizeable industry, with just the furniture and kitchen interior segment generating a production value of 25.3 billion SEK in 2019 and employing over 13,000 people (TMF 2020). Given the size of the industry, it seems appropriate to investigate how this industry segment works with renewable materials. Therefore, the authors set out to understand the design and product development processes in the wood industry, especially the parts of industry creating interior components and furniture. The intention of this was to understand how other industries can utilise experience from the wood industry in their transition towards using more sustainable materials.

This study covers both how companies in the wood industry manage topics like the product development process, material selection and interaction with external suppliers, and how companies in the wood industry manages the introduction of new materials. Both these topics could help guide other industries to become more sustainable in their material selection, by identifying bottlenecks and issues regarding certain parts of the design process in wood-based materials.

While research on material selection (Ashby 2005; Karana, Hekkert, and Kandachar 2007), material perception (Fenko, Schifferstein, and Hekkert 2010; Giaccardi and Karana 2015; Fujisaki, Tokita, and Kariya 2015), design in wood (Hemström, Mahapatra, and Gustavsson 2011; Kuzman et al. 2018, 2018) and production in wood (Johansen and Eklöf 2009) have been done before separately, significantly less has been written on product realisation and product development in the wood industry, and on how to introduce a (arbitrary) new material into a company.

The earlier research that has been done on introducing new materials has pointed towards this being a multidimensional challenge combining technology, skills, processes and organisational change (Henriksson 2017; Henriksson, Davidsson, and Detterfelt 2020). Other research has pointed towards data availability and understanding of material behaviour being challenges for industrial design engineering students working with new materials (Henriksson, Johansen, and Schütte Under Review). These studies have been done within automotive industry, and sometimes by studying engineering students in course projects, but still covering similar topics as this paper seeks to explain.

To summarize, sustainable design and design in renewable materials are vital for companies competing on the market (Cayzer, Griffiths, and Beghetto 2017; Lindahl 2005; Ritzén 2000). Also, in order to transition into designing in renewable materials it is important to understand how these materials might affect the product development process. This, in turn, can be aided by examining how industries already working with renewable materials act when developing new products. One of those industries is the wood industry, and specific knowledge regarding mixing and matching materials in products with a high level of physical interaction can be drawn from studying companies creating interior components and furniture.

Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to aid industries changing into sustainable and renewable materials, by investigating how one industry working with renewable materials, in this case, the wood industry, are managing material-related questions in the product development process. Two main research questions were formulated with underlying questions to fulfill the purpose:

• How do Swedish wood industry companies develop new products?

  • Can a distinct development process be found?

  • How involved are external partners?

  • How involved are designers, engineering designers and production engineers in the development of new products?

  • How do Swedish wood industry companies describe their products?

• What are the bottlenecks for introducing new materials in this industry?

  • How is data availability for new (to the company) wood-based materials?

  • Can the new (to the company) wood-based materials be introduced in an automated production process?

These research questions have been investigated through a qualitative interview study with five representatives from different companies designing and manufacturing products in wood-based materials. By answering the research questions, this paper will contribute to explaining material-related challenges when working with sustainable and renewable materials, to industries looking to switch from non-renewables.

2. Theoretical introduction

The traditional product development process, as described by Ulrich and Eppinger (2008), describes a linear process from collecting customer needs to ramp up production. Authors such as Andreasen and Hein (1986) have suggested a more integrated process, but more commonly the relationship between product development and production is described as an information delivery rather than cross-team collaboration (Henriksson and Detterfelt 2018). When looking specifically at the wood industry, larger networks for product development and production have been highlighted before (Johansen and Eklöf 2009; Mengoni, Peruzzini, and Raffaeli 2013), and Fabisiak (2016) have described the differences between owner-driven processes and team-led processes. Henriksson and Johansen (2018) have shown that there are similarities between developing wood products and classical product development when looking at challenges throughout the project.

Product development material selection models are traditionally based on product functionality (Ashby 2005), rather than more affective aspects. Topics of perception and emotions have been added in later years (Karana, Hekkert, and Kandachar 2007; Fenko, Schifferstein, and Hekkert 2010; Eriksson, Rosen, and Bergman 2018; Bridgens et al. 2019; Dacleu Ndengue, Juganaru-Mathieu, and Faucheu 2017), as well as, for example, criticality of materials (Hallstedt and Isaksson 2017) in an effort to widen the span of factors that affect the selection of materials. Henriksson et al. (Henriksson, Johansen, and Schütte Under Review) have shown a hesitance towards using wood as an engineering material among industrial design engineering students first encountering wood in product development, and factors regarding the material itself (Culbreth, Miller, and O’Grady 1996) could be the reason for this. On the other hand, typically quantitative methods for developing products have been suggested for wood furniture developing companies in earlier research (Antal, Domljan, and Horváth 2016) and there is a transition from relying on crafts-based production towards including automation (Johansen and Eklöf 2009), that both could affect design decisions and material selection. This transition towards automation and industrial production should also put more emphasis on cross-expertise collaboration early in projects since non-engineered wood-based materials are complicated to automate due to material properties and variations (Culbreth, Miller, and O’Grady 1996).

The perception of wood has been evaluated both from a customer’s standpoint and a developer’s standpoint (mainly focusing on architecture). Research on customers has shown at least two different types of customers when looking at houses in wood; customers focusing on performance (ecological and physio-technical) and customers focusing on perception (aesthetics and well-being) (Lähtinen, Harju, and Toppinen 2019). The affective understanding of wood from a user’s point of view seems to transcend multiple senses (Fujisaki, Tokita, and Kariya 2015). Developers tend to highlight perceived sustainability and a perception of ‘honesty’ in the material as positives but highlight challenges in structural performance as a drawback (Robichaud, Kozak, and Richelieu 2009). Earlier research has found some intriguing patterns in the number of non-designers involved in a project and the use of wood as a material for low-story building construction (Kozak and Cohen 1999). In general, designers and architects seem to have a positive view of wood as a possible material (Robichaud, Kozak, and Richelieu 2009; Knowles et al. 2011; Kuzman et al. 2018; Hemström, Mahapatra, and Gustavsson 2011).

Production flexibility has been a topic of research for several decades with increased automation, and several attempts at creating a taxonomy of flexibility types have been made (Gupta and Goyal 1989; Beach 2000). One specifically applicable for wood production is material flexibility (due to the living raw material), which has been described as an ability to manage changes in the material while still producing a sellable product (Gupta and Goyal 1989; Beach 2000; Gerwin 1987). Automation in the wood industry provides opportunities (Johansen and Eklöf 2009; Johansson et al. 2016), but there are inherent challenges in the material that require significant flexibility (Johansson et al. 2016), something that traditionally has been considered as a cost increasing factor (Gupta and Goyal 1989). In a fully manual production process, this can be managed quite easily but needs to be taken into consideration when automation and dedicated production systems are introduced. That means that the flexibility of the system itself might not increase (Gerwin 1987), but it could be a way to keep flexibility while increasing production volumes.

The introduction of new materials in an existing production system is an understudied phenomenon but relates to flexibility types as mix flexibility and material flexibility (Gerwin 1987). The topic itself though is larger than strictly a production system development issue but rather a multidisciplinary challenge including design, production, material science and organisational change (Henriksson 2017; Henriksson, Johansen, and Schütte Under Review).

3. Materials and methods

The study was set up as an interview study with semi-structured interviews, focusing on qualitative data collection. The data collection was done via interviews with a sample of five companies marketing themselves as being based in Sweden, working with wood-based materials, and regularly launching new products. The companies and their product development teams have been used as the unit of analysis (Yin 2014), as this was deemed more appropriate than for example specific employees and their experience. The five companies participating in the study are described in TTable 1.

Table 1. Characteristics of responding companies

Company	Size (employees)	Main materials	Example products	Business to business (B2B) or business to customer (B2C)?	Respondent position
A	11–50	Solid wood	Shelfing	B2C	Owner/designer
B	11–50	Solid wood and textile	Sofas	B2B	Product development engineer
C	250+	Engineered wood materials	Shelfing	B2B	Engineering design manager
D	51–250	Solid wood and veneer bentwood	Armchairs	B2B & B2C	Product development manager
E	51–250	Solid wood	Chairs	B2B & B2C	Production manager

The responding companies were selected to differ in size and type of customers, while still working with wood-based materials and have both some sort of product development and production in the company and in Sweden. After this screening, companies were selected randomly and evaluated as possible respondents before being contacted.

The study was divided into three main phases as shown in Figure 1: one focusing on study design, one on interviewing, and one on analysis. The first phase was done between September 2018 and January 2020, the second phase between January 2020 and March 2020 and the third phase between June 2020 and October 2020.

Figure 1. Methodology for the study, divided into the three distinct phases. Block sizes in figure not representative of time consumption

The first phase included the design of the study and interview guide. From the research questions, a semi-structured interview guide was designed and tested in a small study with two respondents from companies working with wood-based materials. This generated feedback on how to design the interview guide to get responses and reduce misunderstandings between interviewer and respondent. After these interviews, the interview guide was revised and put through an internal review with test interviews, with academics roleplaying as industrial representatives.

The topics of the interview questions (outside of introductory warm-up questions and closing wind-down questions) were product development questions, divided into general product development process questions and questions regarding material selection and how materials are managed throughout the product development process, and questions regarding how these companies have set up their production system and how they decide on new investment. All questions were designed to be somewhat open-ended, or open into follow-up questions, where the interviewee could elaborate on the topic. In Table 2, four sample questions have been translated into English by the authors; the original interviews were conducted in Swedish.

Table 2. Interview topics with example questions from each topic

Interview topic	Example question
Product development	Are you using a formalised product development methodology?
Product development	Which are the most important factors when selecting a material?
Production	How adaptive is your production system for different materials, in your opinion?
Production	Can you describe the last time you made a major investment in the production system?

The second phase consisted of conducting the interviews. When the interview guide seemed to generate suitable results in terms of topics, and as many possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations as possible were ironed out, five interviews with different companies were booked. Interviews were done via phone or Skype and took between 40 and 75 minutes. Respondents’ answers were written down and a recording of the interviews were kept as backup.

The third phase focused on analysis of the interview data. The written answers were separated and transcribed to individual notes, anonymised, and grouped according to similarity in topic and manner of response. These groups were aggregated based on topics and responses were connected to respondents to eliminate findings stemming from one single respondent. The main findings were then extracted and analysed. From the seven different main findings, the three most important ones were selected to analyse further.

The focus in the analysis phase has been on finding patterns of responses, as well as finding responses that could help explain the relationship between design, product development and production. Responses regarding material selection were also highlighted since these were of special interest for this study.

4. Results

From the interviews, it could be seen that almost all companies have a defined product development process, despite differences in how explicitly planned the process is or what the inputs and outputs are described to be. Several companies mention a deliberate use of prototypes as a tool for communication and understanding in this process. In other aspects, the companies differ: they span from doing all design work internally to working solely with external designers, from highly manual production to highly automated production systems and differ in engineering depth in their finished products. Some of the characteristics can be seen in Table 3.

Table 3.. Company characteristics derived from interviews

Company	Design work	Production system	Engineering depth
A	Internal	Highly manual	Low
B	Internal & external	Mixed automation	Low to medium
C	External	Highly automated	High
D	External	Mixed automation	Medium
E	External	Mixed automation	Medium

Table 4.. Summary of the analysis, aimed at multiple possible stakeholders of this paper

Stakeholder	Priority 1	Priority 2	Priority 3	Priority 4
Wood industry	Multiple different organisational cultures can end up with similar material portfolios	Similar product development processes can end up in vastly different products in different materials	The wood industry might be a too broad terminology to aid understanding
Other industry looking at introducing renewable materials	Multiple different organisational culture can end up with similar material portfolios	Production system structure and optimisation affects the material flexibility	Information and data on materials are not a bottleneck for experienced organisations	Wood can be understood and used as an engineering material
Product and production development researchers	Production system structure and optimisation affects the material flexibility	Organizations tend to outsource materials that behave differently than their core materials	The wood industry might be a too broad terminology to aid understanding	Wood can be understood and used as an engineering material
Engineering students or junior engineers	Similar product development processes can end up in vastly different products in different materials	Wood can be understood and used as an engineering material	Solid wood is more complicated to understand and engineer than engineered wood materials

More than the general comments, seven different main findings have been extracted from the interview data as a start of the coding and decoding in phase 3 of the study (see Figure 1):

1. There are three different ways for these companies to describe their products.

2. While external designers are common, the product development and detail designers are working in-house.

   1. The product development processes are similar between the companies.

   2. All companies describe some form of iterative product development process.

3. The ‘smaller’ companies are more flexible and adaptive to new materials, while the bigger companies are more optimised and less flexible.

4. Hardwood is the standard material, with birch, ash, oak, and beech as the most common types.

   1. Pinewood as a design material is a trend that can be observed, the material choice is often explained by sustainability aspects or market trends.

   2. Non-wood materials are used, and there is a large span in the type of materials used (from stone to plastics).

5. Materials and material selection are included very early in the development process, often even in the project brief.

6. Materials that are far away from the core competence are outsourced to suppliers, whatever material the company is working with.

7. Suppliers and availability are the most prominent factors for introducing new materials.

The three most important findings of the ones presented above, in relation to introducing new materials and working with material-related questions in product development, will be a bit further expanded on in the following paragraphs.

There are three different ways for these companies to describe their products

In the interview responses, three different patterns of product description can be found: describing product categories (‘sofas’, ‘tables’, etc.), some sort of product qualities (‘honest products’, ‘modular systems’ etc) or usage/customers (‘furniture for public spaces’). These three ways were presented unprompted, sometimes respondents included two ways in their answer.

The ‘smaller’ companies are more flexible and adaptive to new materials, while the bigger company are more optimised and less flexible

When the smaller companies responded to how adaptive they would be to a new material, the replies were in general positive. The respondents meant that they were able to include a new material without too much work, saying things like ‘it should be no problem’ or ‘we are flexible’.

Suppliers and availability are the most prominent factors for introducing new materials

When asked about what affects the decision to introduce a new material, the respondents mentioned material availability and availability of reliable suppliers. Data availability was explicitly mentioned as a non-issue, with respondents saying, ‘data are not an issue, you can get data on how the material behaves pretty easily’.

5. Analysis and conclusions

The similarity of the product development processes between respondents is not all that surprising, seeing that the described process is what could be described as a baseline process for companies working with multiple products and that have fairly regular product development projects. The irregularities of the material, along with the anisotropic behaviour, could be what drives the need for multiple physical prototypes. However, it should also be noted that most furniture is relatively easy to prototype; the production cost is low and therefore multiple prototypes can be made at a reasonable cost. To conclude; similar product development processes can result in vastly different products and material portfolios, something that is worth remembering when developing and implementing product development processes with a focus on sustainability and sustainable material choices.

Keeping product development engineers in-house and hire external designers are not unique for this industry segment; industrial design consultants are fairly common. What might be somewhat interesting, is the frequency of new product launches (often several launches per year) while still working with external designers. This could partly be explained by the use of multiple designers, and the fact that the designers are brand names as well as the companies making the products: it’s not just a Furniture Company product, it’s a Furniture Company product designed by Big Name Designer.

The use of hardwood as base materials in the observed companies is not surprising, since hardwood and especially birch is traditionally synonymous with ‘Scandinavian Design’, but the trend of using pine in exposed areas is interesting. Since it can be locally sourced and has a distinct visual appearance, pine lends itself to sustainable design very well; it performs well from a sustainability standpoint, and expresses sustainability to customers, something that appears to be one of the main perceived qualities of wood (Robichaud, Kozak, and Richelieu 2009). Pine and other softwoods do not have the same lifespan in products as hardwoods, but softwoods are more common in Scandinavia. Especially pine was used in interior décor (both wall panelling, staircases and furniture) in the 1970’s, but became unfavourable for a longer stretch of time before coming trendy again in recent years.

In the recorded data, there are three different ways for these companies to describe their products: product categories, product qualities and usage/customer. These ways are substantially different, and might reflect on how the company view themselves. In some way, this should represent the companies’ image and idea of what they are, and this would also reflect in their design decisions. The authors believe that this is a result of different organisational cultures being presented. How does that affect the introduction of new products and/or materials? This could affect the willingness to introduce new materialsfor example, let’s say if a company describes themselves as ‘making honest products’ or ‘making products that you want to touch’, this could clash with the perception of certain materials (materials that are not perceived as ‘honest’ or having a positive tactile response) and thus exclude them from the solution space. While the outcomes from this study are interesting, a conclusion regarding the organisational culture’s effect on the willingness and ability of introducing new material cannot be drawn from this. This is a topic that requires further study.

In the replies, a clear line can be drawn between smaller and larger companies regarding their stated ability to introduce new materials. The smaller companies were explicitly saying that they should have no problem introducing a new material, while the larger company was saying that their process is limited in terms of materials due to their level of optimisation. This difference points towards the competition between flexibility and optimisation when setting up a production system being worth discussing; even if this is not the main focus of the production system development, the effects will affect the possibility of introduce new materials and therefore restrict the solution space for future designs. There is a trade-off between flexibility and efficiency in production, as has been traditionally suggested in the literature (Gupta and Goyal 1989), but the responses from the respondents highlight the challenge of finding the right compromise between these two qualities. This could be seen in the difference between the smaller and larger companies, given that large companies have implemented a much more optimised process and thus have less flexibility for new materials in the production system. This also means that introducing a new material will have vastly different effects on the production system that needs to be approached in a different way in these two types of organisations; the more flexible production system should be able to be more robust towards materials with different behaviours, than the more optimised system that is somewhat fragile to variations in the incoming material.

A sidenote worth further exploration is that ‘The Wood Industry’ might not be a good description of this industry segment, as the companies have such different response patterns in how they frame their challenges and their way of work in a development process (that, should be noted, still is similar between all companies). Perhaps, it would be more effective to talk about the structure and flexibility of the production system. The material itself is not a suitable denominator for the generalised issues of product and production development, as long as the production is systematic, and the engineers are skilled working with the materials used.

The emphasis on early selection of materials, perhaps even in the project brief, contradicts some of the established engineering literature (Ashby 2005) that puts this at a fairly late stage of concept design. Where engineering literature often describes the process of gathering customer needs, describing functions, formulating requirements, generating geometries, applying materials and lastly adapt for production, this process seems to be more muddled and iterative. This also connects well to some responses regarding changes of the design from the designer’s first concept to the finalised product, where some respondents said that ‘designers know what we at [company] can do, so that is usually not a problem’. This points towards an (at least implicit) inclusion of production aspects early on in the project or the brief, something that literature doesn’t usually include (Henriksson and Detterfelt 2018). On the other hand, the multiple iterations all the way to prototyping could be a way of focusing on functionality, aesthetics and production in approximately that order; every prototype has its own, specific purpose in the development process.

When introducing new materials, technical specifications and data availability is not considered to be one of the main bottlenecks. This is somewhat contradicting what has been found in studies on industrial design engineering students use of wood as a design material (Henriksson, Davidsson, and Detterfelt 2020), but this difference can be down to the different experiences of students versus engineers working in the industry and with the materials on a daily basis. Respondents highlight academic research, suppliers and industry fairs and workshops as sources for information and inspiration regarding possible new materials. Instead of data, availability and reliability in procurement is highlighted as a challenge and a key success factor for introduction of new materials. Some respondents highlight both the challenge of having materials that can be produced in sufficient amounts, and suppliers that are willing to supply even small orders; one respondent recalled discussing materials with an automotive industry supplier and them having challenges reliably supplying such small orders in their production system. For some materials, respondents explained that they are holding significant stock due to procurement of these materials being done on an irregular basis.

The main takeaways from this study have been condensed into bullets for four different stakeholders; wood industry designers and engineers, engineers and designers in other industries, academia and engineering students and prioritised in accordance with the level of validity of the takeaways as well as the newsworthiness of the takeaways. These bullets are presented in Table 4.

To conclude, we can see similarities in how the responding Swedish wood industry companies approach product development: they have an iterative process with multiple loops ending in prototypes, they do the detail design work in-house and they include material selection early in the process. Sometimes as early as in the project brief. Materials that behave differently from the ‘core materials’ that the company describes are often outsourced to external suppliers. This is common whatever material is described as the core material. The ability and willingness to introduce new materials differ and seems to be based on the optimisation versus flexibility of the production system. This divide also spills over in other responses, prompting the suggestion that there is not a cohesive wood industry and that differentiation based on flexibility/optimisation could be a better distinction for what types of problem arise in companies when introducing new materials into the production system (and product portfolio).

Future studies and acknowledgements

In possible future studies, the authors would like to expand the findings presented in this paper in three directions. The first is to compare larger wood industry companies with other industries having similarly optimised production systems, to see if there are similarities in what challenges they face. The second is to generalise the findings from this paper, by making a quantitative study examining how companies describe their products, the trade-off between flexibility and efficiency, and the challenges of introducing new materials in a process. The third would be to further validate the findings presented here, by following companies and observing how they manage these challenges in real life.

Comparing larger wood industry companies with other industries having similarly optimised production systems, would give insights on to what extent the production system dictates the types of challenges connected to the introduction of new technology, and to what extent factors connected to the actual products or materials used dictates the challenges. This could give some insights on what types of companies that would benefit from collaborating on technology introduction challenges.

Making a quantitative study to generalise the insights from this qualitative study could provide a thorough understanding of how the industry as a whole is coping with challenges related to product development, collaboration with designers and suppliers, flexibility and introduction of new materials and technology.

Deep diving into one or a few of these companies and following up the interviews with observations and collection of richer data could validate that the company is actually doing what they are saying that they are doing. Only using interview data always brings the reliance on the respondents describing the situation correctly, and having a richer dataset could show other possible interpretations of the challenges that the company is facing.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express gratitude to the respondents for providing their time and participating in the study.

This study was supported by the Vinnova BioInnovation research program, in the project IPOS, under Grant 2017-02704.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vinnova [2017-02704].

Notes on contributors

Fredrik Henriksson

Fredrik Henriksson (MSc) is a PhD student at Linköping University, researching product development and material selection. His background is in industrial design engineering and has applied his research on the topic of selecting materials and introducing new materials in the product development process. His research has (as of yet) covered the automotive and furniture industries, spanning materials from advanced technical composites to wood or lightweight metals. The research is done in action research or participatory action research, both in collaboration with industry and academia.

Kerstin Johansen

Kerstin Johansen, Senior Associate Professor in Integrated Product and Production Development, do research with the aim of bridging academia with industry related to industrialisation as well as knowledge transfer. Her research is about facilitating utilisation of new production technologies as well as new materials in existing or new industrial product realisation processes. The research is done in close collaboration with SMEs as well as larger companies, both related to challenges when producing products in new materials as well as utilising new possibilities related to automation, such as human-robots in collaborative assembly applications.

Simon Schütte

Simon Schütte is an Assoc. Prof within product development procedures with focus on affective aspects in products. His research is targeting Kansei Engineering methodology. The most recent application are (user) acceptance for change in novel products. These changes can be due to the introduction of novel materials and techniques as well as legislative demand for sustainable products. Simon Schütte has 20 years of experience of research in this area at Linköping University, but also as a guest researcher and lecturer at Hiroshima International University and UPC Barcelona. He has published around 30 papers in this particular area as well a 1 book and several book chapters.