Annual Report of the Municipal Officers of the Town of Lubec, Maine For the Year Ending March 1, 1913

\u3cp\u3eDesigners are frequently challenged by complex projects in which the problem space is unique, rapidly changing, and the information available is limited. In such cases, combining knowledge from different fields of expertise is required. Furthermore, collaboration during the design process is essential for achieving a meaningful and well-formed solution. Designers therefore regularly find themselves exchanging ideas and reflections in the form of emails, sketches, and images with a group of experts from different backgrounds, working altogether through the creation of a design, its development and proper implementation. This particular chapter focuses especially on issues of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, team dynamics and the management and monitoring of the early stages of the design process. The overall aim is to identify the essential characteristics and needs of distributed teams when in remote collaboration during the early stages of the design process and to suggest a prototype environment based on the identified requirements and workflow.\u3c/p\u3

NEW CONTEXTS, REQUIREMENTS AND TOOLS TO ENHANCE COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PRACTICE

The competitive, post-recessionary business environment is increasing pressures on the design industry to accelerate the cycle of product development. This has clear repercussions for product design practice. Design practitioners are under pressure to quickly develop products which will have immediate success in fiercely competitive markets. The ability to creatively innovate alongside other NPD (new product development) stakeholders has become a priority. Whilst collaboration has always been a cornerstone of design, the new contexts require a greater degree of transparency, sharing and communication amongst crossdisciplinary stakeholders. In order to be fit for purpose the available ICT tools need to evolve if they are to meet these challenges. An interdisciplinary research project entitled ‘COnCEPT’ (Collaborative Creative Design Platform) has been established, and is funded under the European Commission Framework 7 programme. The project examines how technology can be used to support collaborative and creative design practice. This paper reports on the literature surrounding collaboration in creative practices. The current context of professional design practice is described and qualitative research exploring shortcomings in the ICT set-up in design studios is examined. The paper sets out a case study to illustrate how the COnCEPT platform will address designers’ requirements for a collaborative software environment. Key features of the software are described – for example, real-time collaborative sketching spaces, ‘smart’ search tools, and the automatic generation of mood boards – which aim to facilitate creativity and streamline collaboration. The paper explores the potential of the platform, delineating its value in the design process

Creativity and collaboration in early design

Contemporary creative design practice draws from the fields of product design and user-centered design, as boundaries between these two traditions become blurred as design thinking is embraced by industry and academia. By early design we mean design activities taking place with the formulation of an initial design challenge all the way through to the articulation of a design concept and leveling off as designers shift their attention towards more detailed considerations of form, function and interaction, refining the design concept and making the transition to development work. Novel methods applied to the early stages of design help adopt a wider societal and business perspective transcending considerations of products or systems, helping to design for latent needs and emerging user experiences. Intense collaboration with stakeholders from different organizations throughout the design process is often required and design teams tend to be distributed across organizations and geographical locations, which reinforce the need for tools that can support collaboration during the early design process

Design and data: strategies for designing information products in team settings

This chapter aims at linking data and information to creative design, focusing on collaborative processes at early phases of the design with data. The chapter aims at providing clarity in a large space around design and data. Thus, it serves as a guide for design team’s approach towards the challenges of data design. Consequently, design is one of the key disciplines involved in data and information visualization (Moere and Purchase 2011). This chapter starts with a short introduction of ideas and concepts in the intersection of data, information, and design. It looks at users and designers as the main stakeholders, and considered the purpose of designed information. Following this introduction, we first focus on design artifacts essential for collaborative data design practices. Secondly, we focus on what it means to integrate data with design and the potential roles of data in the data design process. The chapter outlines a general design process with methods and approaches towards early design challenges. Furthermore, this chapter concludes with an annotated bibliography to guide further reading. Along the chapter runs an example case of a real information product that helps for better understanding. It links the more theoretical elaborations to the application level of a concrete design case

Big data analytics in e-commerce logistics: Findings from a systematic review and a case study

Digital evolution has significantly changed consumer shopping habits and expectations resulting in a major growth of e-commerce. The immediate outcome of this growth was the creation of a dynamic and turbulent environment with increasing density of the distribution network. This environment consists of many delivery points, multiple delivery channels and last-mile delivery requirements. Due to its complexity and the proliferation of data challenges, e-commerce logistics is an area where the application of Big data analytics can be proven to be extremely fertile. Despite the growing interest, there are limited studies that investigate the role of Big data. By using a design science approach, we clarified the current e-commerce logistics practices as well as the envisioned ones that can, to a large extent, be supported by appropriate big data technologies. We concluded to a set of business requirements that express the needs towards the e-commerce logistics. Then, the requirements were translated into a set of use case scenarios to demonstrate how they could be supported by big data analytics. We conclude by proposing a conceptual architecture of a big data analytics artefact that could cover the e-commerce logistics requirements