Instruments of Generation

This Thesis is a study into possible outcomes on products from recent trends in business culture, virtual and physical tools, and marketing and sales. We will first look at our changing economic and political systems. The situations provide insight into the way goods are produced, by whom they are produced, and the general mood of consumers insights. From there we will consider how changing tools and strategies may lead to similar changes in how we design. And finally we will consider research in customer choice in a world of abundance. My own explorations into different product sets will attempt to reconcile some of the problems mentioned above as well as serve as starting points for developing systems that can acquiesce to a customer\u27s needs

Steampunk as Design Fiction

in this paper we look at the Steampunk movement and consider its relevance as a design strategy for HCI and interaction design. Based on a study of online practices of Steampunk, we consider how, as a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide a useful set of design strategies and implications for HCI

A methodology for energy efficiency redesign of smart production systems

Abstract In the recent years, many methodologies and tools to support the energy efficiency re-design of production systems have been developed, however, they do not investigate the real-time manufacturing process. In this paper, a methodology for energy efficiency re-design of production systems in a context of smart manufacturing is proposed. The continuous production-machine data collection with operator feedbacks enables the creation of a knowledge-based repository that provides useful support during the design of manufacturing systems. A case study in an automotive sector company has allowed to implement the methodology and to assess its effectiveness

Deployment of a software infrastructure for Ecommerce and business analytics in a small business

This project will be a simulation of a real business project that can be found in the enterprise world. We will create an Ecommerce framework for a fictional medium-sized company and we will connect it to a Business Intelligence & Data Visualization software in order to let the enterprise perform business analytics, see their current performance, and provide enough data to final users (e.g. CEOs) to let them to make better decisions. In order to do this project, we will first review the current possibilities to accomplish this type of project. Therefore, we will perform an analysis of the software being used in the market to decide the better one for a medium-sized business, accomplishing all the basic requirements it would need. So, we will do this analysis for the Ecommerce and Data Visualization software. And finally, we will study different solutions to post the shop on the web. For this last goal of posting the web online, we will use a server service that provides a set of instances that can be powerful enough to support an Ecommerce platform. The server service finally selected is Amazon Web Services. As Ecommerce platform, we will use Magento, an open source software, which has been leading the market of Ecommerce platforms for several years [1] [2]. Magento can be modified to create nearly any required feature (e.g. adding a contact section), and also, there is a huge community where other developers post their questions and/or solutions, solving problems, and of course implementing new functionalities. For the Data Visualization part, we will use one of the main leaders on this section: Tableau. It is a powerful tool mainly centralized in performing Visualization procedures. Although it is not open source, and therefore it is closed to its current features, it provides everything that is needed for this project. We will use their Student full version to simulate what would the purchased version provide. Then we will unify all these software elements so we can make business analysis with Tableau, using the information from Magento Ecommerce. We have investigated how to connect these two software frameworks, and also how to get the appropriate information to show in the Data Visualization app. Finally, with the information obtained from Magento, we will use Tableau and create example charts as an introduction to the potential reports, etc. we can create with a tool like Tableau. We will define the tasks and estimate a longitude of the project. Taking into account the tasks and the nature of the project, we will use as work methodology the Waterfall approach, performing only one delivery, as the requirements will not change during the course of the project, and therefore agile methods are not applicable. We will end with the conclusions extracted from the project and the future work that can be added to have a complete and more powerful solution.Ingeniería Informátic

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

Interacting with Smart Environments: Users, Interfaces, and Devices

A Smart Environment is an environment enriched with disappearing devices, acting together to form an “intelligent entity”. In such environments, the computing power pervades the space where the user lives, so it becomes particularly important to investigate the user’s perspective in interacting with her surrounding. Interaction, in fact, occurs when a human performs some kind of activity using any computing technology: in this case, the computing technology has an intelligence of its own and can potentially be everywhere. There is no well-defined interaction situation or context, and interaction can happen casually or accidentally. The objective of this dissertation is to improve the interaction between such complex and different entities: the human and the Smart Environment. To reach this goal, this thesis presents four different and innovative approaches to address some of the identified key challenges. Such approaches, then, are validated with four corresponding software solutions, integrated with a Smart Environment, that I have developed and tested with end-users. Taken together, the proposed solutions enable a better interaction between diverse users and their intelligent environments, provide a solid set of requirements, and can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic

Development of a User Centered Based user interface for building automation control

In recent years, the field of smart buildings has generated much interest for indoor environment where people spent most of their time. Intense research has been focused on improving the building automation system (BAS) to incorporate smart tools and services in order to improve system efficiency and provide well responsive, safe and proactive indoor environment. However, little effort has been made in improving user building interaction that not only restricted the user’s ability to easily operate the system in fact it has also lowered down the user’s confidence for the system. The first objective of the thesis was to select a better option of user building interaction type by doing review of previous research work and comparative analysis of existing systems in the market based on evaluation parameters. From the comparative analysis, it was concluded that only voice user interface (VUI) exhibits complete system acceptability in addition to the flexibility, portability, remote accessibility, usability in comparison to other user building interaction types. Moreover, Amazon Alexa is used for development of VUI that is more system adaptable than other VUIs. The second objective of the thesis was to develop and implement a UI prototype based on selected user building interaction mode to determine its feasibility of integration with existing BAS. A system architecture is proposed and four skills were designed that not only determine the feasibility of control of devices using voice but also capable of performing non-productive tasks on behalf of users to save time for them. The Amazon Alexa and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are primarily used as the development platform for interaction model and backend services for a User Interface (UI). Whereas third party APIs are also used to execute tasks outside of AWS cloud. The developed skills were tested and deployed in the system where multiple users can access the skills from multiple room profiles