Case Study: “Hair meets Design”: The Application of Storytelling in the Context of Long-Distance Collaboration and Virtual Teamwork

Virtual teamwork and long distance collaboration is an increasingly attractive option in design education especially when students and other participants, (for example, industry guests or sponsors) cannot meet in the same physical place or classroom. The constant improvement in technology allows this type of electronic communication to be increasingly accepted as an appropriate format for collaboration and evaluation of student projects. This paper discusses the collaboration between members of a company in Germany and a group of industrial design students in California. It will present the work flow, the evaluation tools and the formats introduced during the process. Since the participants of this project could not meet physically to discuss and evaluate ideas, it was imperative for the teams to develop standard visual formats that were easy to understand and re-utilize. These formats had to be flexible enough for the purpose of adding comments from the evaluators. Because the physical presence of the presenter is missing, it is necessary to adjust the content and layout of the messages in order to make them more relevant and self-explanatory. The message has to be easy to understand without the help of a presenter or lecturer. One of the most significant questions in this project was how to present multiple “layers of information” in one single image at the same time (for example, how to depict work flow, time sequence and object hierarchy in one single frame). In a normal situation (where the presenter is physically present in front of an audience) he/she can verbally add secondary information that would not be visually included but it is necessary in order to understand the relevance of the image being presented. This additional verbal information could be related to time, hierarchy, etc. This paper will discuss the development and evaluation of visual formats that present multiple layers of information in one single image. It describes the methods used and reports the solutions. Ultimately, this paper explains the relevance of using storytelling in the context of long-distance design collaboration. Keywords: Virtual Teamwork; Long-Distance Collaboration; Storytelling; Infographics</p

A Hierarchy Based Interface for Integration of Scientific Applications

Computational Field Simulation processes are typically complex and involve execution of multiple software tools in the form of pipelines to perform simulations successfully. Very often, handling the input and output communication between the tools and allocating computing resources for the processes becomes an essential but an unimportant task for the user. A well written script can often reduce these peripheral tasks and allow the user to concentrate on the analysis. This thesis studies the aspects of design and implementation of a framework called the Integrated Simulation Environment or ISE, that not only forms a scripted environment for high level integration of simulation software tools, but is also flexible enough to accommodate new tools on the fly, while maintaining ease of use and reliability. A hierarchy based design methodology was used to implement the ISE. Hierarchies provide the framework with the flexibility to decompose the complexities of simulation process pipelines and physical entities such as grids and geometries into managable components. Also hierarchies are easily translated into standards such as XML for saving and restoring, and external communication. An Overset CFD simulation process pipeline was integrated into the framework and tested for ease of use, reliability and extensibility. Both simple and complex tools such as a curve extraction tool, a surface grid generation tool, a volume grid generation tool and tools for preparing flow solver inputs were integrated into the system and tested successfully

Eugene – A Domain Specific Language for Specifying and Constraining Synthetic Biological Parts, Devices, and Systems

BACKGROUND: Synthetic biological systems are currently created by an ad-hoc, iterative process of specification, design, and assembly. These systems would greatly benefit from a more formalized and rigorous specification of the desired system components as well as constraints on their composition. Therefore, the creation of robust and efficient design flows and tools is imperative. We present a human readable language (Eugene) that allows for the specification of synthetic biological designs based on biological parts, as well as provides a very expressive constraint system to drive the automatic creation of composite Parts (Devices) from a collection of individual Parts. RESULTS: We illustrate Eugene's capabilities in three different areas: Device specification, design space exploration, and assembly and simulation integration. These results highlight Eugene's ability to create combinatorial design spaces and prune these spaces for simulation or physical assembly. Eugene creates functional designs quickly and cost-effectively. CONCLUSIONS: Eugene is intended for forward engineering of DNA-based devices, and through its data types and execution semantics, reflects the desired abstraction hierarchy in synthetic biology. Eugene provides a powerful constraint system which can be used to drive the creation of new devices at runtime. It accomplishes all of this while being part of a larger tool chain which includes support for design, simulation, and physical device assembly

Systematic evaluation of design choices for software development tools

[Abstract]: Most design and evaluation of software tools is based on the intuition and experience of the designers. Software tool designers consider themselves typical users of the tools that they build and tend to subjectively evaluate their products rather than objectively evaluate them using established usability methods. This subjective approach is inadequate if the quality of software tools is to improve and the use of more systematic methods is advocated. This paper summarises a sequence of studies that show how user interface design choices for software development tools can be evaluated using established usability engineering techniques. The techniques used included guideline review, predictive modelling and experimental studies with users

Ergonomics evaluation of workplace at car tyre service centre

The project title is to evaluate an ergonomic on workplace at car tyre service centre. Too many people are injured while working in automotive workshops. Questionnaire survey on the workers by through interview session is used to identify a level of body discomfort area and sources of injury or uncomfortable feelings. Direct observation is performed by "walk through" inspection using digital camera to evaluate and identify ergonomic risk factor based on work activity that has ergonomic stressors present at the workplace. In particular, the application of Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) is used to evaluate exposures to postures, forces and muscle activities that have been shown to contribute to Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs). From questionnaire survey findings, the twelve (12) of respondents have body discomfort in the neck (8 each), shoulder (10 each), elbow/forearm (9 each), hand/wrist (11 each), knee (7 each), lower leg (7 each) ankle/foot (4 each) and lower back (9 each). The main sources of injury/uncomfortable feeling in workplace are poor body posture (75%), bending the back (75%), highly repetitive motion (75%), heavy lifting object (83.3%), the long term standing (66.7%), long term squatting (58.3%), bending the neck (66.7%) and high hand force (58.3%). And about 50% reported that poor workplace design was contributed to source of injury while 41.7% reported in use of hand tools. Eight (8) pictures were taken by using digital camera for the eight (8) different tasks to identify the ergonomic physical risk factors. Most of the physical risk factors identified were awkward posture from working with the hands above the shoulders, neck bending, bending the back forward, repeated bending, reaching, squatting and kneeling on the hard surface. Lifting heavy objects more than 10 kg, not wearing a hand gloves and exposed to high hand arm vibration when using high impact wrench (air gun) also contributed to the ergonomic physical risk factor. The REBA analysis showed, mostly in a score of eleven (11), very high risk which require action to be taken immediately. This study also includes controlling, minimizing and eliminating the risks of work-related entire body disorders exposure. There is a two hierarchy of controls that are widely accepted for modifying ergonomic hazards in which are engineering controls and administrative controls. Engineering controls involve changing the workstation layout, selection and use of tools, position of process materials, or work methods used to complete a task. Administrative controls are policies or practices directed by management that can reduce or prevent exposure to ergonomics risk factors. The study will be useful to ergonomists, researchers, consultants, workshop managers, maintenance workers and others concerned with ergonomics design in workplace

Conception of the cognitive engineering design problem

Cognitive design, as the design of cognitive work and cognitive tools, is predominantly a craft practice that currently depends on the experience and insight of the designer. However, the emergence of a discipline of cognitive engineering promises a more effective alternative practice, one that turns on the prescription of solutions to cognitive design problems. In this paper, the authors first examine the requirements for advancing cognitive engineering as a discipline. In particular, they identify the need for a conception for explicitly formulating cognitive design problems. A proposal for such a conception is then presented

Aircraft systems architecting: a functional-logical domain perspective

Presented is a novel framework for early systems architecture design. The framework defines data structures and algorithms that enable the systems architect to operate interactively and simultaneously in both the functional and logical domains. A prototype software tool, called AirCADia Architect, was implemented, which allowed the framework to be evaluated by practicing aircraft systems architects. The evaluation confirmed that, on the whole, the approach enables the architects to effectively express their creative ideas when synthesizing new architectures while still retaining control over the process