Towards building and sharing a common understanding of the integrated design field evolution

Questions related to the emergence of new ideas, their density and location may be interesting when trying to understand the evolution of a given field. The design area is an "old" concept that holds many hidden and non-hidden sub-concepts. In this paper we present the latest results obtained frim the study of the evolution of ideas in this field based on published material. The question being addressed relates to the positioning of new fields vis-a-vis established topics. To address this question we have considered a subset of international conferences and journals dealing with design and have made a quatitative analysis using keywords. We then study the positioning of a number of concepts and ideas thet seem to be interesting in considering international issues in engineering design.