The rapid pace of technological change, particularly for engineered systems in the last several decades, has resulted in an explosion in complexity for control-oriented novel, aerospace systems. Traditional approaches to engineering design tend to focus on the inclusion of specific technologies, tacitly ignoring the inherently transdisciplinary nature of the engineering design process. These legacy techniques worked well when the semantic distance between an early concept and its eventual instantiation was much shorter; but the design of today’s aerospace systems demand expertise across multiple engineering disciplines. Systems-Theoretic Concept Design is a new framework for generating early concepts for new aerospace systems for defense and national security applications. Rooted in Systems Theory, STCD extends the principles of Systems-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) and the concepts of control and feedback to produce early design artifacts that are both technology- and architecture-agnostic. Through the effective application of abstraction and a novel view of defense systems as contributors to a higher-level portfolio-of-systems policy, a major milestone in STCD is its second phase Synchronization Across Stakeholder Views. This work presents a set of heuristics and feedback elicitation techniques to manage complexity for new systems within an existing portfolio-of-systems with disparate stakeholders from varying engineering disciplines and operational domains. The primary tool for feedback elicitation is a set of transformational black boxes, a set of models that treat each system within the portfolio as a transformation on its operating environment that can be understood purely through its inputs and outputs.

A challenge in product realisation, involving several functions and individuals with various specialisation, is knowledge integration. The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how and when boundary objects can enable knowledge integration in a product realisation contex. Examples of possible boundary objects in the context of product realisation are engineering drawings and prototypes. Boundary objects are situational, meaning that an object may function as boundary object in one situation, but not in another. It is therefore essential to understand under what circumstances you can expect an object to function as a boundary object. Based on literature and the results from empirical studies, a four-step process assessing the potential of an object to function as a boundary object in a specific situation was developed. The suggested ´boundary object assessment process´ can be a way for manufacturing companies to achieve awareness of how, for example, engineering drawings or prototypes can be used to their full potential as boundary objects. Furthermore the ´boundary object assessment process´ contributes to theory on knowledge integration in product realisation, through the compilation of existing but fragmented evidence on boundary object applications. In addition, boundary objects have the potential to integrate knowledge between disciplines, i.e., supporting transdisciplinary work, and through the suggested ´boundary object assessment process´ the possibility to succeed with this may increase.

Despite increasing interest in transdisciplinary engineering (TE), how to evaluate transdisciplinary (TD) working is not well understood. This paper aims to enhance clarity by presenting a model that differentiates the individual and team-level competencies required to work in a multidisciplinary (MD), interdisciplinary (ID) and TD way. To construct the model, we carried out four steps. First, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify competencies required to evaluate those engaging in TD working. Second, competencies reported within the literature were qualitatively extracted and inductively analysed. These competencies were then thematically grouped into categories and used to construct a model to describe the progression towards, and drivers for, TD work. The model illustrates that TD working must be supported by the cultivation of a set of competencies and that MD competencies focus on goal achievement (which in themselves may be discipline-targeted or distributed), ID competencies focus on integrating ideas from different disciplines, with an explicit appreciation of non-disciplinary and non-academic perspectives on technical advancement, and TD competencies focus on the synthesis of new ideas, solutions or approaches through collaborative skills and common high-level motivational drivers. We characterise the process of such cross-disciplinary working as emergent, emphasising that a combination of individually held, and team-held competencies in addition to a researcher’s disciplinary background can influence how TD work is undertaken.

In the evolving landscape of engineering collaboration, Extended Reality (XR) demonstrates transformative potential for transdisciplinary work. XR approaches are promising in enhancing flexibility and efficiency in diverse, global work settings by facilitating remote and asynchronous collaboration. This paper introduces XR methods designed to address challenges such as communication gaps and project misalignment in asynchronous collaboration. Building upon the previous work at the IMI institute, which introduced Avatar Replay for non-present users, this paper presents an extension that enables interaction with these users through their avatars. This development promotes a more dynamic and responsive approach to asynchronous collaboration. Additionally, the paper shares insights from a preliminary user experiment using Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) with a new prototype in a transdisciplinary assembly scenario. The findings of this research highlight the significant potential of XR in enhancing collaboration and understanding across disciplines, particularly in asynchronous collaboration between experts and non-experts in the engineering domain. The findings of this research contribute to a broader social change by transforming the way users engage and work together in virtual environments, fostering an improved and more human-like collaboration. This enhanced sense of realistic interaction within virtual environments, achieved through our XR methods, not only promises increased societal acceptance of virtual systems but also signifies a transformative shift in the way we work together, seamlessly blending virtual and real-life interactions.