Sean Hanna

Design Science is the discipline that studies the creation of artifacts – products, services, and systems and their embedding in our physical, virtual, psychological, economic, and social environments. This editorial is a collective effort of the Design Science Journal’s editorial board members, past and present. The journal’s inaugural 2015 editorial, “Design Science: Why, What and How,” reflected the thoughts and vision of that first editorial board for the new journal and the discipline it represented. The present contribution offers the reflections of editors who served the journal in the past 10 years. The individual contributions were not primed and are presented here unedited for conformity or consistency. Differently from the 2015 editorial, there is no effort to synthesize the individual contributions, leaving the task to our readers, who can draw their own conclusions about the Design Science Journal and community accomplishments to date, and the challenges ahead.

Basking sharks, Cetorhinus maximus (Gunnerus, Brugden [Squalus maximus], Det Kongelige Norske Videnskabers Selskabs Skrifter, 1765, vol. 3, pp. 33–49), feed by gaping their mouths and gill slits, greatly reorienting their cranial skeletons to filter food from water. The 3D biomechanics of this behavior, however, are exceptionally difficult to study due to the size, elusiveness, and CITES status of these animals and the rarity of well‐preserved specimens. To overcome these challenges, we integrated anatomical, digital design, and computer imaging approaches to reconstruct bio‐realistic and poseable 3D skeletal models of feeding basking sharks. The skeleton, segmented from CT scans of intact heads, was first abstracted as a rigging for guiding skeletal positioning in 3D space. Directed by the anatomies of museum specimens and dissected beached animals, the digital scaffolding was used to virtually correct skeletal distortions (e.g., from specimen collapse), resetting the skeleton to closed‐mouth symmetry. Open‐mouthed feeding postures were recreated by repositioning skeletal joints to biologically relevant destination coordinates defined from videos of feeding sharks, exploiting the basking shark's steady feeding posture to build 3D photogrammetry models from successive video frames. The resultant “digital puppet” bridges diverse imaging data while capturing the coordinated motion of “hidden” cranial joints, deconstructing complex form‐function relationships into computationally controllable parameters for exploring 3D skeletal movement. The input data gathered for our model provides new perspectives on basking shark cranial anatomy, while the model's biological fidelity gives insights into dynamic feeding processes impossible to observe in the laboratory. Branchial arch mechanics are comparatively poorly studied in sharks; our model can act as a platform for future kinematic modeling (e.g., of individual variation, other species), while demonstrating interdisciplinary approaches for studying large and elusive wildlife.

Our experience of a museum is one of unconstrained exploration and a focus on the exhibited works, rather than on the space, yet evidence suggests our movement is strongly influenced by spatial configuration. The observations seem in conflict with our perceived freedom. This conflict is examined through the property of intelligibility, which has two very different meanings: informally it refers to the ease in which overall spatial structure can be understood and grasped ‘in the head’; but it is also a technical term within Space Syntax referring to the degree to which long-range structure is made evident locally ‘in the environment’ itself. Intelligibility of the latter sort makes some routes statistically more likely than others but allows visitors to navigate easily through a complex space based only on local visual information, which minimises the cognitive effort of focusing on the space itself. Rather than requiring a sense of overall structure as a prerequisite for navigation, the visitor can thus build their understanding of the space, over time, as a result of this exploratory movement. This allows attention to focus not on route planning but on the collection itself, which consists of local viewing choices independent of long-range navigation. It is this that forms our experience of the museum and permits the subjective sense of freedom of exploration.

Synopsis: From large ventral pleats of humpback whales to nanoscale ridges on flower petals, wrinkled structures are omnipresent, multifunctional, and found at hugely diverse scales. Depending on the particulars of the biological system—its environment, morphology, and mechanical properties—wrinkles may control adhesion, friction, wetting, or drag; promote interfacial exchange; act as flow channels; or contribute to stretching, mechanical integrity, or structural color. Undulations on natural surfaces primarily arise from stress-induced instabilities of surface layers (e.g., buckling) during growth or aging. Variation in the material properties of surface layers and in the magnitude and orientation of intrinsic stresses during growth lead to a variety of wrinkling morphologies and patterns which, in turn, reflect the wide range of biophysical challenges wrinkled surfaces can solve. Therefore, investigating how surface wrinkles vary and are implemented across biological systems is key to understanding their structure–function relationships. In this work, we synthesize the literature in a metadata analysis of surface wrinkling in various terrestrial and marine organisms to review important morphological parameters and classify functional aspects of surface wrinkles in relation to the size and ecology of organisms. Building on our previous and current experimental studies, we explore case studies on nano/micro-scale wrinkles in biofilms, plant surfaces, and basking shark filter structures to compare developmental and structure-vs-function aspects of wrinkles with vastly different size scales and environmental demands. In doing this and by contrasting wrinkle development in soft and hard biological systems, we provide a template of structure–function relationships of biological surface wrinkles and an outlook for functionalized wrinkled biomimetic surfaces.

Reorientation depends greatly on the perceived geometric information, which constantly changes during navigation in urban environments. Environmental novelty, as a driver of exploratory behavior, is likely to engender this spatial Aha! moment. The paper investigates the contribution of two qualitatively different types of novelty, corresponding to distinct visuospatial cues: (a) situations that cause surprise, e.g., a sudden change in spaciousness; versus (b) situations that engender mystery, e.g., a change in the complexity of visuospatial information and the promise of gaining new information. Visibility graph analysis is used to quantify and examine these hypotheses in relation to participants’ exploratory behavior and brain dynamics (EEG) during virtual navigation. The findings suggest that reorientation is a spatial boundary effect, associated primarily with a change in visuospatial complexity.

A framework for calculating a weighted random walk on an urban street segment network is described, and tested as a predictor of pedestrian and vehicle movement in London and the wider region. This paper has three aims. First, it proposes the simplest possible model of agency in that individuals have neither memory, goals nor knowledge of the network beyond street segments immediately visible at an intersection. Second, it attempts to reconcile two divergent approaches to urban analysis, graph centrality measures and agent simulation, by demonstrating properties of topological graphs emerge from the lowest level agent behaviour. Third, it aims for far faster computation of relevant features such as the foreground street network and prediction of movement than currently exists. The results show that the idealised random walk predicts observed movement as well as the best existing centrality measures, is several orders of magnitude faster to calculate, and may help to explain movement without perfect knowledge of the map, by demonstrating the street network is structured such that long range information on optimal paths correlates with geometrical features locally visible at each intersection.