Gaming techniques and the product development process : commonalities and cross-applications

The use of computer-based tools is now firmly embedded within the product development process, providing a wide range of uses from visualisation to analysis. However, the specialisation required to make effective use of these tools has led to the compartmentalisation of expertise in design teams, resulting in communication problems between individual members. This paper therefore considers how computer gaming techniques and strategies could be used to enhance communication and group design activities throughout the product design process

Complex Problem Solving through Human-AI Collaboration: Literature Review on Research Contexts

Solving complex problems has been proclaimed as one major challenge for hybrid teams of humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Human-AI collaboration brings immense opportunities in these complex tasks, in which humans struggle, but full automation is also impossible. Understanding and designing human-AI collaboration for complex problem solving is a wicked and multifaceted research problem itself. We contribute to this emergent field by reviewing to what extent existing research on instantiated human-AI collaboration already addresses this challenge. After clarifying the two key concepts (complex problem solving and human-AI collaboration), we perform a systematic literature review. We extract research contexts and assess them considering different complexity features. We thereby provide an overview of existing and guidance for designing new, suitable research contexts for studying complex problem solving through human-AI collaboration and present an outlook for further work on this research challenge

Artificial intelligence in the design process

The book discusses how to include artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the early stages of the design process. Today designers need new tools capable of supporting them in dealing with the increasing project’s complexity and empowering their performances and capabilities. AI systems appear to be powerful means to enhance designers’ creativity. This assumption was tested in a workshop where sixteen participants collaborated with three AI systems throughout the creative phases of research, sketching, and color selection. Results show that designers can access a broader level of variance and inspiration while reducing the risk of fossilization by triggering lateral thinking through AI-generated data. Therefore, AI could significantly impact the creative phases of the design process if applied consciously. Being AI systems intelligent agents, the book treats the Human-AI collaboration as a collaboration between human agents, proposing a set of guidelines helpful to achieving an efficient partnership with the machine

Investigating Social Presence and Communication with Embodied Avatars in Room-Scale Virtual Reality

Submission includes video.Room-scale virtual reality (VR) holds great potential as a medium for communication and collaboration in remote and same-time, same-place settings. Related work has established that movement realism can create a strong sense of social presence, even in the absence of photorealism. Here, we explore the noteworthy attributes of communicative interaction using embodied minimal avatars in room-scale VR in the same-time, same-place setting. Our system is the first in the research community to enable this kind of interaction, as far as we are aware. We carried out an experiment in which pairs of users performed two activities in contrasting variants: VR vs. face-to-face (F2F), and 2D vs. 3D. Objective and subjective measures were used to compare these, including motion analysis, electrodermal activity, questionnaires, retrospective think-aloud protocol, and interviews. On the whole, participants communicated effectively in VR to complete their tasks, and reported a strong sense of social presence. The system's high fidelity capture and display of movement seems to have been a key factor in supporting this. Our results confirm some expected shortcomings of VR compared to F2F, but also some non-obvious advantages. The limited anthropomorphic properties of the avatars presented some difficulties, but the impact of these varied widely between the activities. In the 2D vs. 3D comparison, the basic affordance of freehand drawing in 3D was new to most participants, resulting in novel observations and open questions. We also present methodological observations across all conditions concerning the measures that did and did not reveal differences between conditions, including unanticipated properties of the think-aloud protocol applied to VR

Evaluating Digital Creativity Support for Children: A Systematic Literature Review

Creativity, the process of creating something new and valuable, benefits children by improving their skills and development, encouraging interaction and engagement, and enabling the generation and expression of novel ideas. In recent years, interactive digital tools have emerged to support the user’s creativity in the open-ended creation of new artifacts. However, the question of evaluating the creativity happening in the interplay between children, digital tools, and products is still open. This systematic literature review investigated the evaluations of digital creativity support tools for children and identified 81 peer-reviewed relevant articles from the last 10 years. This research contributes to practitioners and researchers by providing an overview of the evaluations in a framework based on 10 factors (value, novelty, fluency, enjoyment, user feeling, collaboration, expressiveness, immersion, flexibility, and interaction), nine product areas, three approaches, and five methods. The review demonstrated that the evaluations differ widely, and the area lacks a standard evaluation framework. We propose the dimensions of our analysis as an initial framework for situating the evaluation of digital creativity support tools for children that the child–computer interaction community can further refine

RAMPVIS: Answering the Challenges of Building Visualisation Capabilities for Large-scale Emergency Responses

The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisation and visual analytics (VIS) capacities to support emergency responses under difficult operational conditions. In this paper, we report the experience of a group of VIS volunteers who have been working in a large research and development consortium and providing VIS support to various observational, analytical, model-developmental, and disseminative tasks. In particular, we describe our approaches to the challenges that we have encountered in requirements analysis, data acquisition, visual design, software design, system development, team organisation, and resource planning. By reflecting on our experience, we propose a set of recommendations as the first step towards a methodology for developing and providing rapid VIS capacities to support emergency responses

Artificial intelligence in the design process

The book discusses how to include artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the early stages of the design process. Today designers need new tools capable of supporting them in dealing with the increasing project’s complexity and empowering their performances and capabilities. AI systems appear to be powerful means to enhance designers’ creativity. This assumption was tested in a workshop where sixteen participants collaborated with three AI systems throughout the creative phases of research, sketching, and color selection. Results show that designers can access a broader level of variance and inspiration while reducing the risk of fossilization by triggering lateral thinking through AI-generated data. Therefore, AI could significantly impact the creative phases of the design process if applied consciously. Being AI systems intelligent agents, the book treats the Human-AI collaboration as a collaboration between human agents, proposing a set of guidelines helpful to achieving an efficient partnership with the machine