Technology-related Challenges in Smart Clothing-Viewpoints from Ideation Workshops

Smart clothing is a booming, growing technology and business branch of wearables. Its users range from sports and entertainment customers to military, and new applications can be found, especially in the care sector, for example, in gamification for health and well-being. We organized 5 ideation workshops to gather ideas about the potential users and uses of smart clothing. The participants brought up several types of technology-related challenges during the workshops. This article introduces these challenges. The results were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis. Based on the gathered data, the main challenge groups were found to be ethical concerns, operating features and the technology's reliability, and, for example, the lack of a need-based and user-oriented design process.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

An Empirical Examination of Consumer Survey Use in Trademark Litigation

This Article is a comprehensive examination of the use of consumer surveys in trademark litigation cases at the federal level. Previous research has shown consumer surveys can be critical to the outcome of trademark litigation, as they measure the idiosyncratic mental associations and reactions of prospective consumers. For this Article, this study examined 843 trademark infringement and dilution cases spanning 2007 to 2017. The findings reveal consumer surveys are not utilized in trademark litigation as often as research suggests they should be. While consumer surveys are not required in trademark litigation, nor necessarily easy or inexpensive to com- mission, this study shows there are situations where it may be most prudent to produce survey evidence. This study in this Article also provides insight into the potential impact of consumer surveys on the outcome of both trademark infringement and dilution cases in sports. As instances of trademark infringement and dilution are on the rise, sports apparel brands are actively trying to defend themselves against consumer confusion. In most cases, the findings indicate plaintiffs should seriously consider conducting consumer surveys during litigation, as the potential impact of losing a trademark infringement or dilution case could cost the plaintiff its trademark and, ultimately, its brand

Fulfilling the curious omission of host company responses to reshoring : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Management, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

While offshoring has become one of the most significant strategies adopted by home companies, its subsequent reshoring has created new challenges to research. For reasons that remain unexplained, the extant literature focuses on 'Why' and 'How' to reshore near exclusively from the home company's perspective. However, an interactive dyadic relationship exists between the two resource bundles during reshoring. The findings of a content-analysis based literature review reveal that published case studies focus on Western firms' offshoring and subsequent reshoring strategies, ignoring the host company response. Single and multiple case studies were completed using data collected from four host companies in China. The single case study explores the host company's response to reshoring and its influence on the home companies' decisions. Thematic analysis generated four response strategies: cost-related; market-related; knowledge-related; and, relationship-related. The multiple-case study was used to identify how the host company orchestrates resources obtained from the offshoring network in response to reshoring. Four dimensions of resources acquired from the offshoring network: financial; physical-asset related; knowledge; and, human resources were identified. The network for resource exchange was also observed to contain actors beyond the dyad, notably clients who contributed to the resource bundle. The home company's repatriation leaves resources in the host country, defined as the available residual resource (ARR). This resource bundle then leads to risks and potential sources of competition for the home company. This study adds a new dimension, the host company, to reshoring studies restoring what has become unilateral research into a bilateral dialogue

PosiTec - how to adopt a positive, need-based design approach

In User Experience (UX) design many approaches emphasize that a positive UX can be promoted by addressing basic human needs. However, in practice UX design needs are scarcely considered. We believe that this is due to a lack of adequate methods and guidelines and present a methodological toolkit to support designers in adopting a need-cantered design approach. The toolkit is a collection of innovative user research methods, combined in a guided process to make sure that user needs are taken into account in all steps of the human-centered design process. We propose Experience Interviews as a basis to extract and further interpret the user needs of the target group. The interpretation is realized with the Needs Profile method and fed into an ideation brainstorming. First design solutions of this brainstorming are evaluated and further developed using the co-creation tool UX Concept Exploration. The concrete application of the proposed methods is illustrated based on the example of designing a technical product to promote positive aging of older adults

Composition of object-oriented software design models

In practice, object-oriented design models have been less useful throughout the lifetime of software systems than they should be Design models are often large and monolithic, and the structure of designs is generally quite different from that of requirements. As a result, developers tend to discard the design, especially as the system evolves, since it is too difficult to keep its relationship to requirements and code accurate, especially when both are changing. This thesis identifies a number of key, well-defined problems with current object-oriented design methods and proposes new techniques to solve them. The new techniques present a different approach to designing systems, based on flexible decomposition and composition. The existing decomposition mechanisms of object-oriented designs (based on class, object, interface and method) are extended to include decomposing designs in a manner directly aligning design with requirements specifications. Composition mechanisms for designs are extended to support the additional decomposition mechanisms. The approach closely aligns designs with both requirements specifications and with code. It is illustrated how this approach permits the benefits of designs to be maintained throughout a system’ s lifetime