Our 6th International Summer School „Product Architecture Design - PAD2024” was successfully carried out at the Graduate Academy of the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) from 17-21 June 2024. Once again, the strong research collaboration between Prof. Kevin Otto (Australia), Prof. Seung Ki Moon (Singapore), Prof. Ola Isaksson (Sweden) and Prof. Dieter Krause (Germany) from TUHH brought young reseachers from all over the world together for a week full of learning, joint workshops and exchange.

The participants from various countries, including Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Finland and Singapore, learned about product architecture design and modularisation approaches. The state of the art from four different perspectives and the presentation of current trends in this field of research formed a solid basis for the ensuing research workshops.

Focusing on the topics of sustainability and circularity, functional architecture modelling, innovation induced by field effects and the fuzzy front end of product development, the young researchers learned about new product development methods and were able to apply these directly to our workshop example - a product family of vacuum cleaner robots.

The participants had the opportunity to discuss the possibilities and limitations of the various approaches and to link them to their own research. On this basis, the participants joined forces to look for new research areas and work on them in small groups.

We believe that this was the start of a fruitful network and thank everyone for their support and participation in PAD2024. We would like to thank Körber Technologies for the co-operation and the opportunity to give us an insight into a world of very sophisticated and well elaborated mechanical engineering, their processes and systems. We would also like to thank the TUHH, the TUHH Graduate Academy and the Design Society for their support in making the PAD International Summer School on Product Architecture Design possible once again.

For the first time in 2022 the 5th International Summer School „Product Architecture Design - PAD2022” was conducted at CampX - Startup Accelerator by Volvo Group in collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology in Gotheburg, Sweden. It took place from 20th to 23rd June and was hosted and organized by Professor Ola Isaksson with the help of Professor Dieter Krause (PKT), Prof. Otto from University of Melbourne and Professor Seung Ki Moon from Nanyang Technical University, Singapore.

The event was successfully carried out with 20 participants from different nationalities from German, Danish, Swedish and Singaporean universities and from industry.

Participants learned about product architecture design and modularization approaches and used the input in the exercises. The mix of state-of-the-art and highlighting current trends in sustainability, manufacturability, digitalization and servicitation could be used in the guided workshops on functional design, lifecycle modularity analysis, field effects, innovation and product-service systems.

Participants had the opportunity to discuss the possibilities and limitations of the different approaches and link them to their own research. Based on the workshops and discussions, participants also had the opportunity to look for new research areas and work on them in small groups.

We hope that this has resulted in a fruitful network and thank everyone for their support and participation in PAD2022. We also thank the sponsors, as the 5th International Summer School on Product Architecture Design PAD2022 was sponsored by The Design Society and Produktion2030.