Perceived Affective Qualities in Flight Deck Design

Conference Proceedings final program is available at: https://ahfe.org/files/AHFE2023_FinalProgram.pdf .Abstract: Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) practices in aviation generally focus on the system’s functional features like human performance, human error, workload, and situation awareness, without considering the emotional aspects of the interaction. However, there is a shift from a cognitive perspective to an affective one, which concerns promoting pleasure instead of just preventing design deficiencies. While traditional human factors have focused on efficiency, usability, and safety, emerging approaches have also focused on product experience. There has been a growing interest in affect and pleasure in such areas as engineering design, psychology, neuroscience, human factors, and industrial design. This study aims to transfer these emerging approaches into aviation by determining the perceived affective qualities in a flight deck design. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with pilots by using the Repertory Grid Technique with Laddering Technique to elucidate how pilots experience a flight deck design. According to the results, 33 constructs were determined which show the qualities of attributes produced by flight deck and the affective states of pilots when these qualities are provided

User workshops: a method for eliciting user needs

In many of the design cases designers may not have the required knowledge about users’ needs, and it may be difficult to empathize with users. In order to meet the needs of users, designers should gain knowledge about them, and users can be consulted to elicit their tangible and emotional needs. However the users may have difficulties in expressing their needs or they may not be aware of them. This paper presents a method called user workshops, which investigates tangible and emotional user needs by letting them imagine and express a usage context and design problems, and to experience a concept development process. In user workshops, by taking certain steps users are asked to create a product for their personal use. In order to prepare them to conceptualize a product they are asked to prepare mood boards with given images considering a theme related to the product usage. This process directs them to consider their needs and to define problems related to the product and their emotional relation with it. Later the users are asked to express their concept product solutions verbally and visually in the form of sketches and cardboard and/or play-dough mock-ups. This method proposes means for designers to empathize with users

DESIGN FOR THE WELL-BEING OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS: IMPLEMENTATION OF A THREE-STAGE USER RESEARCH MODEL

This paper presents how we, as design educators, integrated user-centeredness into a design studio course project that is concerned with improving well-being of domestic cats and dogs. Since the primary users of the project were identified as domestic animals, we carried out the project in collaboration with experts from a veterinary medicine school who study animal behavior. We developed a three-stage user research model to enable students to familiarize themselves with the physical and emotional needs of the animals at the beginning, and test their prototypes with the users in both the lab and home contexts during the project. The empirical basis of the paper comes from the interviews we conducted with 12 students who participated in the project, in order to explore their experiences of designing for animals. The paper shows that including animals in a design process as participants, through iterative trials in the real use context, serves as a good strategy to not only overcome the challenges of designing for animals, but also teach students the importance of user-centeredness and building empathy in design in a broader sense

User requirements for analogical design support tools: Learning from practitioners of bio-inspired design

When designers develop biologically-inspired design (BID) solutions, they are engaging in a process of analogical design. Software tools have been developed to support analogical design processes, presenting designers with information to help in the construction of useful analogies. However, the requirements for such tools have not been explicitly informed by accounts of practitioners’ experiences. To address this, interviews were conducted with 14 expert practitioners in BID to understand how they find and apply cross-domain analogies. Three main themes emerged from the analysis: (1) the skill sets of individual practitioners; (2) the ways they work as part of an interdisciplinary team; and (3) their orientations to biology. These themes present opportunities and challenges for developing analogical design support tools

Industrial Designers in UX Practice: Motivations, Professionalization, and the Construction of Designer Identity

Our article discusses the insights from original research conducted with design practitioners to better understand the experiences of industrial design graduates as they are adopting new professional roles in user experience (UX) affiliated positions. We utilize narrative identity work as the theoretical frame to interpret the legitimation strategies of industrial designers while grounding their motivations, perceived competence, and fitness to a UX position. Such narratives support our arguments on the conscious efforts of designers toward the construction of a professional designer identity, which is stimulated by this role change

Measuring paw preferences in dogs, cats and rats: Design requirements and innovations in methodology

Studying behavioural lateralization in animals holds great potential for answering important questions in laterality research and clinical neuroscience. However, comparative research encounters challenges in reliability and validity, requiring new approaches and innovative designs to overcome. Although validated tests exist for some species, there is yet no standard test to compare lateralized manual behaviours between individuals, populations, and animal species. One of the main reasons is that different fine-motor abilities and postures must be considered for each species. Given that pawedness/handedness is a universal marker for behavioural lateralization across species, this article focuses on three commonly investigated species in laterality research: dogs, cats, and rats. We will present six apparatuses (two for dogs, three for cats, and one for rats) that enable an accurate assessment of paw preference. Design requirements and specifications such as zoometric fit for different body sizes and ages, reliability, robustness of the material, maintenance during and after testing, and animal welfare are extremely important when designing a new apparatus. Given that the study of behavioural lateralization yields crucial insights into animal welfare, laterality research, and clinical neuroscience, we aim to provide a solution to these challenges by presenting design requirements and innovations in methodology across species

Kullanıcı araştırmasının tasarım sürecine etkili bir şekilde iletimine yönelik bir model geliştirilmesi.

It is a commonly held belief that the integration of user research data into the design process can bring great benefits; and there have been many studies that not only examine these benefits, but have also suggested how these researches may be carried out. However, effective integration relies as much on the way information gathered from user researches is delivered to the designer as the quality of the information gathered. Examples of how user research findings are communicated can be found in literature; but what is lacking is a structured approach to developing deliverables with a framing of discussions about effectiveness, considering the practitioner’s needs and expectations. This study aims to investigate how user research findings should be communicated to the designers in order to maintain effectiveness in integration of the findings to the design process. A model and strategies and guidelines to achieve effective communication are proposed as the result. In order to propose them the methodology involves three main stages, including a literature search, an in-depth interview with the practicing designers and a verification questionnaire to confirm the findings of the previous two stages. The results of the study reveal expected outcomes of the user research activity by designers as the dimensions of effective communication of user research findings. Moreover qualities of the delivery mediums and informational content of the deliverables are identified from practitioners’ perspectives. The outcome of the study is a set of strategies and guidelines that the researches should consider, while designing new deliverables and planning communication activities for delivering user research findings to the design process.Ph.D. - Doctoral Progra

Affective human factors in aviation

Conventional Human Factors/Ergonomics (HF/E) approaches in aviation concentrate on the product's or system's utility and underestimates the power of the users' feelings. By a majority, HF/E emphasizes on ease of access, human performance, human error, workload and situation awareness, which are related with the functional features of the system, without emotional interactions. However, it is now clear that the success of the product in the market comes from its aesthetic appeal and the affect it creates on the users; the interaction between the user and the designed artifact is impressed by emotions. There has been a growing interest in research of industrial design, engineering design, psychology, neuroscience, and human factors engineering to affect and pleasure. There is a shift from cognitive perspective to affective, which concerns promoting pleasure instead of preventing pain (workload, error, etc.) resulting by the design. There are many studies in the literature focused on the consumer products. However, complex systems like aviation industry where performance and safety is the main point, is still impassive to affective design, the theoretical constructs related to affective design have been poorly defined. Affective considerations might provide a new and different perspective in aviation human factors. This study will present the importance of affective human factors in aviation and purposes some suggestions to reflect affective design to cockpit design. © 2017 by American Helicopter Society International, Inc. All rights reserved

Information and interaction requirements for software tools supporting analogical design

One mode of creative design is for designers to draw analogies that connect the design domain (e.g., a mechanical device) to some other domain from which inspiration is drawn (e.g., a biological system). The identification and application of analogies can be supported by software tools that store, structure, present, or propose source domain stimuli from which such analogies might be constructed. For these tools to be effective and not impact the design process in negative ways, they must fit well with the information and interaction needs of their users. However, the user requirements for these tools are seldom explicitly discussed. Furthermore, the literature that supports the identification of such requirements is distributed across a number of different domains, including those that address analogical design (especially biomimetics), creativity support tools, and human-computer interaction. The requirements that these literatures propose can be divided into those that relate to the information content that the tools provide (e.g., level of abstraction or mode of representation) and those that relate to the interaction qualities that the tools support (e.g., accessibility or shareability). Examining the relationships between these requirements suggests that tool developers should focus on satisfying the key requirements of open-endedness and accessibility while managing the conflicts between the other requirements. Attention to these requirements and the relationships between them promises to yield analogical design support tools that better permit designers to identify and apply source information in their creative work

A Proposed information systems framework for effective delivery of user research findings

Integration of user research findings into product design process is a well-received issue. There is a tremendous research on how to conduct user research and methodologies for generating user data. However delivering that information effectively is as important as the quality of data generated through user research, since if it is not delivered effectively the impact that is demanded by the product developers would not be achieved. Therefore the requirements for the deliverables should be conceptualized before designing them, in order to have an effective integration. Thus the aim of this paper is to propose an information systems framework for effective delivery of user research findings to the product development team members. In this paper, a preliminary effort to construct this framework is made by retrieving the framework's constructs from the literature