Smart Product Design Methodology

The noticeable emergence of new technological advances, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT), and their continuous developments in today’s market, have paved the way for an apparent transformation from conventional products to smart connected products. Smart products are Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that provide services to users through Internet and Communication capabilities. The use of smart products offers exceptional potential for the users to meet their expectations and needs intelligently and effectively. Hence, designers and manufacturers are encouraged to cope with constantly changing consumers’ requirements and help in satisfying their needs. It is necessary to achieve a high level of awareness when interacting with smart products, where in some cases, ambiguity and uncertainty may lead to an undesired outcome. Thus, the objective of this research thesis is to introduce a novel smart product design methodology that reveals a new design dimension that was found by conducting an extensive literature review. Smart product design methodology uses integration between existing Design Theory and Methodologies (DTM), both Systematic Design Approach (SDA) and Axiomatic Design Theory (ADT) which are integrated through the features and functions of smart products. The proposed design methodology concentrates on reducing the complexity of the product and raising its affordances for the users to perceive. This research includes a case study on smart speakers and voice-initiated virtual assistants specifically on Amazon’s Alexa, where the methodology proposed was applied. As a result, the complexity was reduced by achieving an uncoupled design, and affordances’ measures were discussed using the guidelines and recommendations concerning both visual and voice design perspectives for designers and developers of virtual assistants in order to maximize the affordances for the user to perceive with the least amount of ambiguity and doubtfulness

IT affordances and reconciling alternative modes of evidence giving in cyberinfrastructure: the case of Climate Change Research

This qualitative study was conducted to examine how multi-disciplinary environmental science teams utilize cyber-infrastructure to generate and assess evidence as part of their boundary spanning research. We find that this interdisciplinary research is difficult due to the divergent institutional logics of the team members (represented by the tenets of their communities of practices, dominant epistemological frameworks and dispositions towards data) which force researchers to synthesize incommensurate forms of data and warrants into their scientific arguments. We examine how the affordances enacted in the cyber-infrastructure enabled one environmental science team to ameliorate these challenges. This study contributes to the nascent literature on the new forms of evidence giving within scientific fields by building a theoretical framework to account for how affordances enacted within cyber-infrastructure can assist researchers as they negotiate the conflicting institutional logics associated with diverse fields. We conclude by discussing how these issues impact the effectiveness of interdisciplinary inquir

An Affordance-Actualization Perspective on Smart Service Systems

Smart physical products increasingly shape a connected IoT world and serve as boundary objects for the formation of ‘smart service systems’. While these systems bear the potential to co-create value between partners in various industries, IS research still struggles to fully capture the phenomenon to support successful digital innovation in IoT settings. In our work, we analyze the phenomenon of smart service systems taking an affordance-actualization perspective. Based on a qualitative content analysis of a multi-case study, we identify elements and propositions to build mid-range theoretical knowledge for smart service systems. We suggest that providers and users of smart products not only realize their own affordances via their actions but might also affect the immediate concrete outcomes of partners. The developed theoretical framework and six distinct propositions should build the theoretical base for further research into the phenomenon in IS research

Towards a kansei-based user modeling methodology for eco-design

We propose here to highlight the benefits of building a framework linking Kansei Design (KD), User Centered Design (UCD) and Eco-design, as the correlation between these fields is barely explored in research at the current time. Therefore, we believe Kansei Design could serve the goal of achieving more sustainable products by setting up an accurate understanding of the user in terms of ecological awareness, and consequently enhancing performance in the Eco-design process. In the same way, we will consider the means-end chain approach inspired from marketing research, as it is useful for identifying ecological values, mapping associated functions and defining suitable design solutions. Information gathered will serve as entry data for conducting scenario-based design, and supporting the development of an Eco-friendly User Centered Design methodology (EcoUCD).ANR-ECOUS

An Affordance-Actualization Perspective on Smart Service Systems

Smart physical products increasingly shape a connected IoT world and serve as boundary objects for the formation of ‘smart service systems’. While these systems bear the potential to co-create value between partners in various industries, IS research still struggles to fully capture the phenomenon to support successful digital innovation in IoT settings. In our work, we analyze the phenomenon of smart service systems taking an affordance-actualization perspective. Based on a qualitative content analysis of a multi-case study, we identify elements and propositions to build mid-range theoretical knowledge for smart service systems. We suggest that providers and users of smart products not only realize their own affordances via their actions but might also affect the immediate concrete outcomes of partners. The developed theoretical framework and six distinct propositions should build the theoretical base for further research into the phenomenon in IS research

Middleware for Work Support in Industrial Contexts (MiWSICx)

It is generally acknowledged that technological innovation is leading to an increase in the complexity of industrial work. Hence, work assistance has emerged as an important theme in the context of cyber-physical production systems and Industry 4.0 to assist workers in assembly, logistics, maintenance and supervision. Recent research in this domain has focused on demonstrating assistance applications using mobile computing devices such as tablets, smartphones, AR/VR glasses and wearables, but the aspects of technology induced complexity in industrial work distribution, concurrency, information complexity, and variability of information interaction, and their subsequent effect on human workers is yet to be tackled. This paper has two core contributions: first, it reframes the problem of complex industrial work through activity theory, which leads to a conceptual model that couples human information needs to interactive artefacts within an activity context. Second, the problem of assistance is viewed as managing information flow between multiple devices grouped into fluid and adaptive activity contexts, managed by MiWSICx, (Middleware for Work Support in Industrial Contexts) a novel, distributed middleware designed using the actor model of concurrent computation

BlueSky: Combining Task Planning and Activity-Centric Access Control for Assistive Humanoid Robots

In the not too distant future, assistive humanoid robots will provide versatile assistance for coping with everyday life. In their interactions with humans, not only safety, but also security and privacy issues need to be considered. In this Blue Sky paper, we therefore argue that it is time to bring task planning and execution as a well-established field of robotics with access and usage control in the field of security and privacy closer together. In particular, the recently proposed activity-based view on access and usage control provides a promising approach to bridge the gap between these two perspectives. We argue that humanoid robots provide for specific challenges due to their task-universality and their use in both, private and public spaces. Furthermore, they are socially connected to various parties and require policy creation at runtime due to learning. We contribute first attempts on the architecture and enforcement layer as well as on joint modeling, and discuss challenges and a research roadmap also for the policy and objectives layer. We conclude that the underlying combination of decentralized systems\u27 and smart environments\u27 research aspects provides for a rich source of challenges that need to be addressed on the road to deployment

Experience-driven Engineering in IoT: The Importance of User Experience for Developing Connected Products People Love

In this paper, we describe the factors we have seen as influential in building contemporary tools specifically through the lens of connected devices and experiences. The Internet of things (IoT) provides a radically improved way to see how our tools/devices actually perform in the field and if customers use, abuse, or do not understand them. The complexity associated with designing a connected product or experience often causes its architect to focus almost exclusively on the enabling technology itself as opposed to the actual design and end user experience—the value or utility—that they create it for. We walk through fundamental design principles. This paper provides principles, frameworks, recommendations, and resources to ensure human-centered and user experience-led design for the IoT

Design Methods Review for Smart Product: Objectomy, a New Approach

Digital artefacts call for new design challenges: they enable services, technology-driven and multidisciplinary never ended processes, uncouple form-function, in a social relationship that must be ecosystem-framed. Then, the usual design mindset is not proper and expected vs unexpected outcomes must be equally studied. A framework of methods, in view of the usual design variables and the new ones called by design of smart objects, is here offered. From that the seeds for the future aid to the design process of smart objects result. Then, Objectomy and one real application case are described

Ontology-Based Digital Twin Framework for Smart Factories

In modern smart factories we have multiple entities that interact with one another, such as worker-assistance system, robot collaboration and their corresponding software modules. To fa- cilitate seamless cooperation between those subsystems, it is beneficial that they all have access to one coherent environment model. Hence, we propose an ontology-based Digital Twin that al- lows semantic representation of all important parts of such a scenario. It allows uniform access for different application components such as intention recognition and robotic action planning. Furthermore, it provides information tailored to the needs of those different components, e.g., via different zoom levels and affordances