“There’s a lot of interaction between us,” Prof. Thomas Maier is pleased. He has been the Head of Industrial Design Engineering since 2003 and is currently the most senior of the four professors at the IKTD. And indeed, one point follows from another - or better: one research aspect from another - during the conversation in no. 9 Pfaffenwaldring. The slogan “We construct and design technology”, which the IKTD has adopted since the 1980s, is the starting point here. “The slogan still applies and has become a common credo.”
For the moment, the institute’s expansion consists of an increase in the number of professorships from the former two to now four: In the field of design, the Chair of Interior Design Engineering, held by Prof. Wolfram Remlinger, was added back in 2020. In the field of construction, Prof Matthias Kreimeyer succeeds Prof. Binz as Head of Product Development and Engineering Design. In addition, the newly established Chair of Lightweight Design is headed by Prof. Philipp Berendes. “There’s probably no institute like this in Germany that has this unique combination of disciplines,” Kreimeyer points out. “The four focus areas are a specialty, by which we can provide a high level of support and supervision to our students and doctoral researchers, while maintaining the range and continuity of possible research topics.”
With an overarching focus on the development and design of technical products, there are many interfaces within the faculty. The field of construction engineering and technical design is “rather interdisciplinary”, says Prof. Kreimeyer: “We’re not so much interested in how a single device or machine must be designed on the object level. Instead, we’re looking at this on the meta level. In so doing, we specify which steps in the product development process and which technical principles are always the same.” According to Kreimeyer, the unifying question is: How is a product created? For this purpose, you need models, methods, and tools: “All the more so in an environment that is defined by ever more complexity and has become more digital, more integrated, and more international at the same time.”
We are looking less at the object level and more at the meta level and specify which steps in the product development process and which technical principles are always the same.
Prof. Matthias Kreimeyer
Complex system architectures
As clear as the common line is, as differentiated are the individual research fields and perspectives of the four professorships. Matthias Kreimeyer, who studied mechanical engineering and engineering sciences in his hometown of Hanover and in Munich and then completed his doctoral degree at the Technical University of Munich in the field of product development, is focusing on product development, drive technology, and computational methods.
He is particularly interested in complex system architectures, i.e. “systems engineering”. This is not just about modeling issues, but above all about how to handle and break down complexity - especially when these issues are still unclear to some extent in the early stages of development. “The system architectures and development tools for industry must become simpler,” Kreimeyer emphasizes. “We need to provide methods and tools for this purpose.” Personally, the 46-year-old finds it exciting to find solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises. He benefits from the fact that he has been doing just that for the past twelve years: Since 2010, he has worked in various roles at MAN Truck & Bus SE, where he was most recently the Senior Vice President responsible for product strategy and product planning. Even today, he likes to speak of “my trucks” when talking to students. “In the future, however, this could also be any other machine or an integrated system into which you couple a digital service,” he points out.
Lightweight design in construction
Philipp Berendes, too, has spent the past twelve years of his professional life in the automotive industry. First, he worked at Bugatti, and since 2013 he has been a manager for conceptual lightweight design in the field of product properties at the sports car manufacturer Porsche. The main focus of the mechanical engineer, who studied at RWTH Aachen University and completed his doctoral degree at the Technical University of Braunschweig, is lightweight design in construction - a specialty.
“Everybody talks about lightweight materials, but how these can be used sensibly in construction is still largely to be explored,” says the 43-year-old. His approach turns the present construction process upside down: “First we model the structural optimization in order to obtain better initial values for construction. In further simulation loops, we then approximate the target function.” It is important to him not to rely merely on high computing power, but that the creative activity of the engineer becomes the focal point. Here, too, there’s a wide range of research questions: How do lightweight components affect the range of properties of moving systems? Are the materials really sustainable? “Lightweight design initially reduces the energy requirement when the machine is in operation. However, many lightweight materials have a large carbon footprint. That’s why you have to honestly analyze over the entire product life cycle which material is really the most suitable.” This directly results in another key question, says Berendes: “Which other product features will be positively affected by lightweight construction?”
Focusing on the vehicle interior
The focus of Wolfram Remlinger‘s research is on the design of vehicle interiors. His field of research includes more than just cool shapes and expensive materials. “It covers the entire technical interior concept of vehicles, from analysis to design. A large number of components and materials need to be combined to form the vehicle interior,” Remlinger explains.
“It’s important to consider both the technical possibilities and human needs.” Innovative computer-aided methods and modeling help in this process. Remlinger, who came from Audi to the University of Stuttgart in 2020, has turned his particular attention to autonomous driving and the resulting changes in the vehicle cockpit.
Having human-machine communication in mind
A main focus of Thomas Maier’s work was and is human-machine communication, which is reflected in the design of interfaces and vehicles as well as in methodological issues regarding design and usability. “For example, we want to know how adaptive systems adapt to humans, and the solutions we find are very interesting,” says Maier.
One example is the project RUMBA, where researchers from the University of Stuttgart and numerous partners from science and industry investigate how interaction in automated driving must be designed in the future in order to ensure comfort and safety under the changed conditions of highly automated driving. Maier’s research area, too, is continuously developing and also allows critical questions: How sustainable are touchscreens? How does a vehicle have to be designed so that it is lightweight and still looks like a quality product? How can sustainability be visualized in vehicle design?
A broad spectrum in apparatus, machinery and plant engineering
Although the cars play a big part in the individual resumes of the professors, they don’t want their position to be reduced to a “car professorship”. Instead, the agenda includes a broad focus on machinery and equipment in all forms: “Technological development and design thrive on taking experience from a wide variety of industries, but also, for example, from the social sciences, and feeding it back into research,” Prof. Kreimeyer explains. In modern drive technologies, for example, the car is still an innovator and an important location factor in Germany that has an impact on many other areas. “The fact that three of us had the opportunity to gain a lot of experience in this field is an asset to the university.”
Modern teaching
Students can expect “modern teaching” from the IKTD. Specifically, this means a shift in the focus of teaching content from conventional mechanics to integrated systems with many digital components, as well as to changed business models. “An engineer today needs completely different tools to develop a contemporary machine,” Kreimeyer points out. Overcoming the late effects of the corona crisis will be another challenge in teaching, he says. The professors agree that especially in undergraduate studies, interactive work in small groups and also networking among students was seriously affected by the pandemic. “There is now a large number of students who are mostly decoupled from regular university life and will need an additional two to four semesters to complete their degree. And of course we want to support them!” For the future, the professors say, they need to discuss how digital and open the teaching materials have to be and what didactic approaches are required. What this means exactly and how values such as equal opportunities can be ensured, they say, remains to be seen: “Caution and a sense of what is appropriate are required here.”
Further information: Institute for Engineering Design and Industrial Design IKTD