Broadening Design and Designers' Perspective

The rapid diffusion of advanced hardware and software technologies and the societal challenges (Castelo-Branco et al., 2019; Martin and Leurent, 2017; United Nations, 2015), which we are urgently asked to face now and in the next years, are demanding for a widening of our design perspective. Design activities are becoming even more multidisciplinary, and designers are requested to properly evaluate in advance the effects of their solutions and the potential consequences of their decisions at a broad spectrum. Such an increase in the complexity of design activities should be seen as a stimulus and as a natural evolution of all those design processes intended to introduce radical and positive changes in our daily life. However, to properly tackle this challenge designers should continuously update their professional and cultural knowledge and skills (Dym et al., 2005) while hardware and software tools should be made, even more, widely accessible to all (e.g., see (Von Hippel, 2005)). Indeed, researchers should concentrate their efforts on developing technologies for guiding designers to take up such complexity properly, and on improving dedicated design methods, tools and guidelines. They should help designers to exploit the design potentials of current and next hardware and software technologies, and push designers to deal with such complexity more systematically. Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies are an example of technologies that have now reached a high level of accessibility thanks to their wide diffusion. They have been conceived to enlarge the solutions space by providing more design freedom (Thompson et al., 2016): they enable the exploration of advanced design possibilities, for example, by combining multiple materials and by working at different manufacturing scales. Alone or in combination with others, they thus represent an enabling technology for the development of innovative products/services. However, considering their rapid evolution and the advanced and multidisciplinary design scenario they are offering, designers should be trained on how to, successfully, Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) (Rosen et al., 2015); indeed, design process/activities can significantly benefit from the potentialities and the advantages that these technologies can provide. The papers of this issue demonstrate the fundamental role played by AM technologies, on the one hand, and the implementation of structured and comprehensive design strategies, on the other, in broadening design and designers’ perspective. Besides, it is the proper combination of these two aspects that can lead to significant steps forward when designing new products/services. The first paper, “3D printed 3D-Microfluidics: recent developments and design challenges” provides a useful state of the art in the field of the fabrication of 3D-Microfluidics devices using AM technologies. In this paper, it is shown how the technological improvement in AM could lead to a new approach in the design of microfluidic devices by allowing for intricate 3D channels that could lead to innovative solutions and application. Examples of new possibilities in the design and manufacturing of 3D