About a year ago, I had the honor to contribute to a special paper for the 25th anniversary of ASME’s DTM on empirical studies of design thinking. Through discussions with my esteemed coauthors, we concluded that there is a lack of consensus on how to collect and analyze data, due to the lack of cognitive models of designing, and the resource-intensiveness of field studies with human subjects. Our recommendations were to improve external validity and achieve a higher rate of discoveries. My current research on design for additive manufacturing has brought back my previous work on engineering-to-order processes and MBSE to my attention. I have come to understand that not only the both ends of the engineering product design process deserve equal attention, but emerging additive manufacturing methods shift the paradigm in bringing both ends to a circle.