Post-Series Design: a tool for catalysing the diffusion of personalisable design.

Today a range of increasingly mainstream Digital Fabrication tools help designers not only in prototyping, but also in the production of final parts for consumer products. These hardware tools, while still have significant limitations, they already offer new levels of morphological freedom and logistical flexibility, which allows the efficient production of personalisable products – supposing advanced software tools of Parametric Design. However, since DF, PD and personalisation are still marginal, one may suspect that the Design profession has a shortage of adequate capabilities. Therefore, this contribution proposes a conceptual tool focused on valorising the previous hardware and software tools to achieve meaningfully personalisable products. The proposed canvas tool is structured specifically to facilitate opportunity identification and conceptual design, based on a set of key advantages (variabilities) derived from numerous case studies of existing personalisable products realised with DF. The new approach and tool have been experimented with a class of product design students, but it also aims to facilitate product development at enterprises, coherently with the emerging Industry 4.0 paradigm

Point of Care Tools and Libraries: 12th Annual Health Sciences Lively Lunch

This session included a discussion about point of care tools in the health information setting. Klimley provided a presentation on the point of care tools landscape that highlighted the importance and relevance of this topic now, evaluations that have been published about these tools, funding issues, and desirable elements of the tools. The presentation included examples of marketing techniques and product advertisements to portray the various claims and testimonials regarding these products, which provided a critical discussion on the products and their use in health information settings. A lively discussion followed the presentation to allow participants to express some of their concerns about point of care tools and their role in the future. The results of the session are explained in the document

Managing creative eco-innovation: Structuring outputs from eco-innovation projects

Increasing legislative pressures and consumer awareness of environmentally efficient products are causing businesses to look at Sustainable Product Design (SPD) as an opportunity to improve their products and processes. Business and academia have identified a need for strategic approaches to SPD that will result in ‘step-change’ improvements in the design of products and services. Eco-innovation aims to develop new products and processes which provide customer and business value but significantly decrease environmental impact. Eco-innovation considers environmental aspects of the product at early stages of the New Product Development process. The research presented in this paper looks at the use of eco-innovation tools and focuses on idea generation within ecoinnovation processes. Two novel tools were developed to help review the results from previously conducted eco-innovation workshops: the Standard Design Process Form and the Product Ideas Tree (PIT) diagram. This paper shows the development of these two tools and demonstrates their potential to assist in structuring and documenting ideas throughout the eco-innovation process. The paper discusses the benefits of using such documentation and how it may subsequently improve the management of eco innovation throughout the design process

Using a Combination of Measurement Tools to Extract Metrics from Open Source Projects

Software measurement can play a major role in ensuring the quality and reliability of software products. The measurement activities require appropriate tools to collect relevant metric data. Currently, there are several such tools available for software measurement. The main objective of this paper is to provide some guidelines in using a combination of multiple measurement tools especially for products built using object-oriented techniques and languages. In this paper, we highlight three tools for collecting metric data, in our case from several Java-based open source projects. Our research is currently based on the work of Card and Glass, who argue that design complexity measures (data complexity and structural complexity) are indicators/predictors of procedural/cyclomatic complexity (decision counts) and errors (discovered from system tests). Their work was centered on structured design and our work is with object-oriented designs and the metrics we use parallel those of Card and Glass, being, Henry and Kafura's Information Flow Metrics, McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity, and Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics

Bayer AG v. Housey Pharmaceuticals: Protection for Biotechnological Research Tools under Section 271(g) Found Wanting

[Excerpt] Research tools, a subset of biotechnological inventions protected by process patents, are “tools that scientists use in the laboratory, including cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, growth factors, combinatorial chemistry and DNA libraries, clones and cloning tools (such as PCR), methods, laboratory equipment and machines.” Many companies base their business models on the ability to find pharmaceutical products using their proprietary drug discovery research tools. Research tools used for drug discovery ‘include bioinformatic methods for identifying the interaction of certain proteins and their association with disease, methods for confirming protein targets, screening assays to identify molecules active against a target, and safety profiling assays.’

Animal residues found on tiny Lower Paleolithic tools reveal their use in butchery

Stone tools provide a unique window into the mode of adaptation and cognitive abilities of Lower Paleolithic early humans. The persistently produced large cutting tools (bifaces/handaxes) have long been an appealing focus of research in the reconstruction of Lower Paleolithic survival strategies, at the expenses of the small flake tools considered by-products of the stone production process rather than desired end products. Here, we use use-wear, residues and technological analyses to show direct and very early evidence of the deliberate production and use of small flakes for targeted stages of the prey butchery process at the late Lower Paleolithic Acheulian site of Revadim, Israel. We highlight the significant role of small flakes in Lower Paleolithic adaptation alongside the canonical large handaxes. Our results demonstrate the technological and cognitive flexibility of early human groups in the Levant and beyond at the threshold of the departure from Lower Paleolithic lifeways

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