Higher education stimulating creative enterprise

This report summarises the research undertaken by the Business & Community School at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), analysing ways that higher ediucation (HEIs) can support, and indeed stimulate, the creative economy. The research, in collaboration with the Arts University College Bournemouth (AUCB) and the University of Winchester, serves as a mere snapshot of the numerous ways that Universities engage with the diverse industries under the 'creative' nomenclature and of the very real and poistive ways that the higher education sector contributes to the growth of the creative economy in thhe UK

Engineering Adaptive Model-Driven User Interfaces for Enterprise Applications

Enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning systems have numerous complex user interfaces (UIs). Usability problems plague these UIs because they are offered as a generic off-the-shelf solution to end-users with diverse needs in terms of their required features and layout preferences. Adaptive UIs can help in improving usability by tailoring the features and layout based on the context-of-use. The model-driven UI development approach offers the possibility of applying different types of adaptations on the various UI levels of abstraction. This approach forms the basis for many works researching the development of adaptive UIs. Yet, several gaps were identified in the state-of-the-art adaptive model-driven UI development systems. To fill these gaps, this thesis presents an approach that offers the following novel contributions: - The Cedar Architecture serves as a reference for developing adaptive model-driven enterprise application user interfaces. - Role-Based User Interface Simplification (RBUIS) is a mechanism for improving usability through adaptive behavior, by providing end-users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout based on the context-of-use. - Cedar Studio is an integrated development environment, which provides tool support for building adaptive model-driven enterprise application UIs using RBUIS based on the Cedar Architecture. The contributions were evaluated from the technical and human perspectives. Several metrics were established and applied to measure the technical characteristics of the proposed approach after integrating it into an open-source enterprise application. Additional insights about the approach were obtained through the opinions of industry experts and data from real-life projects. Usability studies showed the approach’s ability to significantly improve usability in terms of end-user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement

A multi-agent approach for design consistency checking

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest to advanced product development methods, such as Computer Integrated Manufacture, Extended Enterprise and Concurrent Engineering. As a result of the globalization and future distribution of design and manufacturing facilities, the cooperation amongst partners is becoming more challenging due to the fact that the design process tends to be sequential and requires communication networks for planning design activities and/or a great deal of travel to/from designers' workplaces. In a virtual environment, teams of designers work together and use the Internet/Intranet for communication. The design is a multi-disciplinary task that involves several stages. These stages include input data analysis, conceptual design, basic structural design, detail design, production design, manufacturing processes analysis, and documentation. As a result, the virtual team, normally, is very changeable in term of designers' participation. Moreover, the environment itself changes over time. This leads to a potential increase in the number of design. A methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control (IDMC) is proposed to alleviate some of the related difficulties. This thesis looks at the Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control, in the context of the European Aerospace Industry, and suggests a methodology for a conceptual framework based on a multi-agent architecture. This multi-agent architecture is a kernel of an Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System (IDMCS) that aims at ensuring that the overall design is consistent and acceptable to all participating partners. A Methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control is introduced and successfully implemented to detect design mismatches in complex design environments. A description of the research models and methods for intelligent mismatch control, a taxonomy of design mismatches, and an investigation into potential applications, such as aerospace design, are presented. The Multi-agent framework for mismatch control is developed and described. Based on the methodology used for the IDMC application, a formal framework for a multi-agent system is developed. The Methods and Principles are trialed out using an Aerospace Distributed Design application, namely the design of an A340 wing box. The ontology of knowledge for agent-based Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System is introduced, as well as the distributed collaborative environment for consortium based projects

Collaboration Between Developers and Designers

Customer-facing applications are essential for businesses. Therefore, a good user experience is fundamental for their success in the market. Companies nowadays employ highly specialized people in front-end development and User Experience (UX) & User Interface (UI) design to achieve this goal. Their collaboration is critical, and raises some efficiency challenges in the software industry. This work focuses and is applied on OutSystems, a low-code platform that inherits these challenges. While there are some code-generation plugins for popular design tools, these do not generate code for low-code platforms. Therefore, the transformation process from design to development is done 100% manually, which is highly inefficient. Our goal is to accelerate this transformation process from a design model to a development model to mitigate this inefficiency. To do so, we developed an approach using model transformation techniques that automates part of the process. Namely, it automates the generation of application pages/screens by composing the screen mockups in a design technology (such as Figma or Sketch) with a library of reusable UI components to instantiate the design in a front-end technology (such as OutSystems). Our approach was validated by a professional team of front-end developers from an established enterprise-grade low-code platform who applied and evaluated this work on some of their past real projects. Preliminary results show an overall acceptance of the developed tool with a possible increase of 150% to 400% in the value that they can deliver without investing more effort than they already do today. This mitigates a bottleneck faced by development teams today. To increase the value, they could offer to customers (e.g., by producing more application screens in the same period), they would need to recruit new collaborators whose skill set is high on demand. This work delivers major efficiency improvements and lessens the severe lack of qualified professionals, by allowing existing ones to produce more without investing further effort.As aplicações são algo essencial para as empresas. Uma boa experiência de utilizador é fundamental para o sucesso destas aplicações no mercado. Hoje em dia, para alcançar este objetivo, as empresas empregam pessoas altamente especilaizadas em desenvolvimento Front-End e de UX (User Experience) & UI (User Interface) design. A colaboração destas equipas é crucial e de momento apresenta desafios de eficiência na indústria do software. Este trabalho foca-se na OutSystems, uma plataforma low-code, que tem subjacente estas ineficiências que estão presentes em toda a industria. Embora atualmente existam alguns plugins de geração de código para as ferramentas de design populares, estes não geram código para plataformas low-code. Portanto, o processo de transformação de design para desenvolvimento é um processo 100% manual, o que resulta em perdas de eficiência que serão refletidas no valor final entregue aos clientes. O nosso objetivo é acelarar este processo de conversão de um modelo de design para um modelo de desenvolvimento Front-End para mitigar esta ineficiência. Para tal, desenvolvemos uma abordagem utilizando técnicas de transformação de modelos que automatizam parte do processo. Nomeadamente, este automatiza a geração de páginas/ecrãs de aplicações através da composição de mockups de ecrãs numa tecnologia de design (como o Sketch) com uma biblioteca de componentes de UI reutilizáveis para instanciar o design numa tecnologia Front-End (como a OutSystems). A nossa abordagem foi validada por uma equipa profissional de desenvolvimento Front-End de uma plataforma low-code de nível empresarial que aplicaram e avaliaram o trabalho em projetos passados reais da equipa. Os resultados preliminares mostram uma aceitação global da ferramenta desenvolvida, com um possível aumento entre 150% a 400% no valor que conseguem oferecer. Isto permite mitigar um ponto de fricção que as equipas de desenvolvimento encontram de momento. Para aumentar o valor que a equipa consegue entregar aos clientes (por exemplo, através da produção de mais ecrãs no mesmo período de tempo), estes necessitariam de empregar novos colaboradores cujas habilidades têm elevada procura. O nosso trabalho oferece uma alternativa mais económica para o aumento da eficiência e ao mesmo tempo diminui o impacto da escassez de profissionais qualificados, ao permitir que os já existentes consigam produzir mais sem investimento adicional da sua parte

User perspective on AM-enabled mass customisation toolkits

Mass Customisation (MC) toolkits are powerful user interfaces that enable customers to engage in the design of their own products. This research follows design research methodology (integrated with design process) to research the user perspective on AM-enabled MC toolkits. This research proposes and validates a design framework to guide designers and software developers in designing a user-centred AM-enabled MC toolkits, enabled using digital fabrication technologies such as Additive Manufacturing (AM). This framework includes pre-implementation assessment, and implementation stages. An initial literature review revealed a lack of standard or universal norms for these user interfaces, and a lack of consistency in their design, in which web objects such as logo, product image, prices, etc. are not shared commonly among toolkits, nor occupy a frequent position. Furthermore, an optimum number of degree of freedom for MC toolkits is lacking from current design knowledge. This research focuses on AM-enabled Mass Customisation toolkits as a means to enable customers design; its concentration is on users. A first quantitative study was conducted to compare and rank of a collection of features. More detailed user requirements regarding the content and layout of MC toolkits were revealed in a workshop. As a part of the second study, four different CAD systems (software programs and 3D-enabling libraries) were used to create MC toolkits. This provided an understanding of the pros and cons of each system, and demonstrated Three.js to be the best system amongst each one s feasibility and application. Based on previous findings, and as a part of the UX-design process, a prototype web-based MC toolkit was constructed, utilising the Three.js library. The prototype was used for a second study as a platform to investigate, the user interaction and usability of the toolkit, to validate the toolkit design as well as provide insights for its improvement. Findings and reflections from all the studies were then visualised and communicated in an interactive design framework. A final study, conducted with professional users (N=4) assessed the usability and technicality of the framework tool and led to a number of suggested improvements. The main contributions to knowledge are: 1- a table was produced to compare the features of four different system, by which Three.js was identified as the most suitable among them 2- most important and expected features for the content were obtained from the user rankings, most frequent location of features for the layout was identified based on the users, and user insights were reflected based on the evaluation of the prototype 3- the UI needs to be flexible in term of degrees of freedom, in another words, each customer (novice or professional) is able to adjust the number of options presented. 4- a framework was proposed through reviewing and adapting existing guidelines and findings from this research