Published Article / The world seems to be an increasingly fast-changing place with many societal trends coming and going each year. However, some world-wide trends seemed to have established themselves as being more long-term in nature, e.g. more widespread expectation of global warming, increasing fear of terrorism and globalisation of economies. Other trends are largely confined to the industrialised economies of North America, Europe and the Pacific Rim. Examples include an ageing population, more demanding customers and increasing disposable income. Different trends will be seen in other regions. The impact of these trends upon designers and design cannot be overstated. They will affect the way consumers purchase, use and dispose of products. The types of products that consumer's buy and the features they will require from their products will change. Designers must respond to this with innovative product designs that make optimum use of the already scarce natural resources available. Likewise, engineers must be innovative in their task of converting these designs into reality. <br>This paper seeks to identify some of the trends that will have most impact upon product design in a number of global regions. The responses that designers could (or should) make to these are listed together with some examples of products that illustrate the issues involved. The impact upon the way designers think and how they need to be educated is also discussed. Finally, designers' ideas are only pipedreams until they are transformed into reality through the effort of various types of engineers. The paper concludes by describing some of the new challenges that engineers will face as they play their role in responding to global and regional trends. It is highly likely that the challenges will vary somewhat from one region to the next and so it is crucial that locally-adapted solutions are implemented.

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In current globalized and highly demanding markets, Quality does not constitute any more a competitive advantage for organizations. Instead, Quality represents a basic market entry requirement for organizations indistinguishable from the country or economic sector they belong to. Being conscious of the importance of Quality for all type of organizations, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the identification and better understanding of current trends in academic research on Quality Management. By analyzing a sample of 612 academic papers collected from five international Quality journals and two QMOD international conferences over 2010 and 2011, the author will study and reflect on the current trends of global academic research related to Quality Management. Literature review was used as research methodology for the thesis. Academic papers were categorized, classified and analyzed in order to identify current research trends on Quality Management. This work provides a snapshot of the current research trends on Quality Management. It benefits the educational sector, researchers, industry and practitioners by presenting an overview of the current research needs as well as potential future research topics. As a result of this study, five main trending research topics on Quality Management were identified: management systems standards, total quality management, service quality, customer related processes after delivering product/service and excellence models. China, India, USA, Sweden and UK were identified as the countries that have published the highest number of academic papers in international Quality journals during the studied period. Additionally, it was found a marked predominance of academic research on Quality Management towards the service sector. These results and the answers to five proposed research questions were discussed and solved in this report.

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