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Aims and Scope of JIDPS: Understanding, Improving, and Practicing of Design

As it is stated in its Aims and Scope, Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science (JIDPS) publishes research findings covering transdisciplinary notions of design and process with a focus on issues that deal with 1) understanding of design and process crossing boundaries of natural, human, and built environments, 2) principles, methods, and tools, and 3) applications of design and process science to engineering and social problems. The first issue is about the scientific foundation of design, which aims to understand the factors that have significant impact on design; the second issue is about the methodology and methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of design activities; and the last one is about the design of things following the guidance from the first two issues. This has formed the framework for the journal’s editorial office to select and organize our publications. This issue of JIDPS includes three papers covering respectively these three aspects. The first paper, titled “The nuances and management of multinational design teams – a Sino and Occidental comparison” by Waal et al., falls under the category of understanding design activities. It aims to identify key issues that affect the success in managing multinational design teams. Through interviewing designers of different nationality and design backgrounds about their experiences, it was found that background (cultural, national and economic) factors can affect how a designer approach a design problem, particularly for framing and goal analysis. These individual background factors determine how a designer may work in a team with designers from another background. This research noted: 1) designers with a low level attitude toward design and a lower level of emotional intelligence tend to be less effective to work in such teams; 2) the introduction of information technology tools may increase the chance of success thanks to the increase of shared understanding of the design; 3) through the standardisation of design practices, background differences would be less significant; and 4) the impact of background differences on design skills and practice does not appear to be permanent. The second paper, titled “A software quality model by using discriminant analysis predictive technique” by Ronchieri et al., falls under the category of methods to improve design effectiveness through enhanced quality and reduced errors. It aims to periodically predict the quality of software code development at any stage and to identify problems of software development at an early phase. In order to achieve this objective, the authors extend a mathematical model that connects software best practices with a set of metrics using a risk-threshold-based discriminant analysis technique. The extended model was tested using the data gathered from several European Middleware Initiative packages, which have different scopes and characteristics. Such a model is highly expected of conceptual design and strategic planning processes.