How do interactive tabletop systems influence collaboration?

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the ‘‘around-the-table’’ form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The ‘‘aroundthe-table’’ form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task

A Universalist strategy for the design of Assistive Technology

Assistive Technologies are specialized products aiming to partly compensate for the loss of autonomy experienced by disabled people. Because they address special needs in a highly-segmented market, they are often considered as niche products. To improve their design and make them tend to Universality, we propose the EMFASIS framework (Extended Modularity, Functional Accessibility, and Social Integration Strategy). We first elaborate on how this strategy conciliates niche and Universalist views, which may appear conflicting at first sight. We then present three examples illustrating its application for designing Assistive Technologies: the design of an overbed table, an upper-limb powered orthose and a powered wheelchair. We conclude on the expected outcomes of our strategy for the social integration and participation of disabled people

Assisting Designers in the Anticipation of Future Product Use

En ligne sur le site de l'éditeur : http://www.aijstpme.kmutnb.ac.th/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&view=viewcategories&Itemid=1In this paper, we present some theories sover past decades describing interactions between designers and users, and a state of the art of methods and tools to support these interactions in user-centred design. We discuss related methodological issues as a first step toward the introduction of new methods to assist usercentred design, to avoid uses of the product which might have undesirable consequences, while leaving margins allowing users to adapt to the situation and potentially introduce further innovations within the product. Lastly, we discuss the concept of unforeseen use and introduce creativity methods to help designers anticipate these uses

Tableau de manipulation pour patients atteints de la maladie d'Alzheimer

L'invention TIPATSMA (Tableau Interactif pour Patients atteints de Troubles Sévères de la Maladie d'Alzheimer) se rapporte à un tableau interactif destiné aux patients atteints de la maladie d'Alzheimer

Creativity in virtual teams: bridging the gap between professional wisdom and scientific insights

Following the growing body of scientific literature dedicated to the effects of virtual tools and environments on creative processes, we were interested in examining how professional creativity facilitators perceive these technologies and the extent to which they might support their dissemination. To this end, we conducted a workshop with 19 professional facilitators in which they could experience creativity in a virtual environment. Their ratings of the potential impact of such tools on session facilitation, on sociocognitive processes of creativity and on group motivation were collected twice: before and after the virtual session. The results show that their perception of the potential benefits of virtual environments decreased after the test. They mentioned many limitations of the technology with regard to usual facilitation process. Moreover, their expert perception of the creative process sometimes appeared contradictory to scientific results obtained in the domain. We discuss these results and provide design perspectives to make virtual technologies more acceptable and usable for creativity facilitators, in order to allow more population to benefit from their positive effects on group creativity. Santrauka Remiantis didėjančiu mokslinės literatūros, skirtos virtualių priemonių ir aplinkos poveikiui kūrybiniuose procesuose, kiekiu, nagrinėjama, kaip profesinės išminties fasilitatoriai suvokia šias technologijas ir mastą, kuriuo jie galėtų sustiprinti savo veiklos sklaidą. Šiuo tikslu surengtas seminaras, kuriame dalyvavo 19 profesionalių fasilitatorių. Seminare jie turėjo galimybę įgyti kūrybiškumo patirties virtualiojoje aplinkoje. Tokių priemonių galimo poveikio vertinimai sesijos palengvinimo, kūrybiškumo sociokognityvinių procesų ir grupės motyvacijos aspektais buvo atlikti du kartus – prieš ir po virtualiosios sesijos. Rezultatai rodo, kad jų virtualiosios aplinkos teikiamos galimos naudos suvokimas sumenko po atlikto bandymo. Jie paminėjo daugybę technologijų keliamų apribojimų, susijusių su įprastine fasilitacija. Be to, jų ekspertinis kūrybiškumo proceso suvokimas kartais atrodė prieštaraujantis šioje srityje gautiems moksliniams rezultatams. Rezultatai aptarti ir pateiktos su projektavimu susijusios perspektyvos, kad virtualiosios technologijos taptų priimtinesnės ir naudojamos kūrybiškumo fasilitatorių ir kad didesnė populiacijos dalis gautų naudos iš jų pozityvaus poveikio grupės kūrybiškumui. Reikšminiai žodžiai: įsisavinimas, kūrybiškumo fasilitacija, inovacija, priemonė, virtualioji aplinka

Radical innovation through the extraordinary user method

Cet article présente la méthode de l’utilisateur extraordinaire, dont le but est de stimuler l’innovation radicale en permettant aux concepteurs de redécouvrir les besoins fonctionnels liés à l’usage des produits. Cette méthode s’inspire des approches centrées utilisateurs, tout en cherchant à éviter le phénomène de Dilemme de l’innovateur, néfaste à l’innovation radicale. La méthode repose sur l’inclusion, dans les toutes premières étapes du processus d’innovation, d’utilisateurs extraordinaires qui vont permettre de redécouvrir les besoins fonctionnels fondamentaux, oubliés, de la population cible. Ces utilisateurs extraordinaires peuvent être trouvés parmi des Lead users, des enfants, des séniors, des personnes en situation de handicap, ou des non-utilisateurs. Cette proposition méthodologique est illustrée de cas d’applications dans divers secteurs socioéconomiques

Collaborative design tools in engineering education: Insight to choose the appropriate PLM software

The shift from sequential to concurrent engineering has led to changes in the way design projects are managed. In order to assist designers, many effective tools have been developed to support collaborative engineering. Nowadays, industrial scenarios encourage companies to adopt product lifecycle management solutions, even if they may not be able to understand their benefits. Indeed, product lifecycle management roadmap is quite difficult to implement and return on invest can take time. Moreover, many free solutions with comparable functionalities are developed, which have been increasingly successful. In this article, we test different configurations of software to make a comparison between free software and market solutions. In this experiment, 72 students in a Master’s degree course aimed to design mechanical products by using dedicated software to assist collaborative distributed design, using two different configurations: free and commercial solutions. The research question to be solved is: as engineering educators, what is the most efficient way to train our students to collaborative distributed design? This experiment allowed us to compare design functionalities between the two configurations, in order to determine ways to improve efficiency in a collaborative distributed design situation. Finally, the feedback generated in this experiment allowed us to adapt training practices in engineering education

Conception et Evaluation d’un Modèle d’Expressivité pour les Gestes des Agents Conversationnels

To increase the believability and life-likeness of Embodied Conversational Agents, we introduce a behavior synthesis model for the generation of expressive gesturing. A small set of dimensions of expressivity is used to characterize individual variability of movement. We empirically evaluate our implementation in two separate user studies. The results suggest that our approach works well for a subset of expressive behavior. However, animation fidelity is not high enough to realize subtle changes. Interaction effects between different parameters need to be studied further

Construire des scénarios d'usage prospectifs dans les projets

Prospective ergonomics is concerned with the anticipation of future needs and activities to assist the early stages of user-centered innovation design projects. Few studies have proposed methodologies to assist prospective ergonomics, although this is a key to better integrating user-centered design in innovation projects. Indeed, classical methods of use analysis are of limited relevance when designers must work with ill-defined product concepts, since it may be difficult to describe future uses for these products. In this paper, we argue that some creativity methods, often used to solve technical design problems, can be used to construct speculative scenarios describing the future use of a product. We carried out simulations of design meetings, focusing on anticipating the future uses of various products. In two studies, we assessed the effects of methods borrowed from two creativity paradigms on the ability of a multidisciplinary design team to formulate prospective scenarios of future use. The first study aimed to assess the contribution of methods borrowed from the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) paradigm – brainwriting and the discovery matrix – to the production of prospective scenarios of future use. Results show that these methods allow a more structured exploration of the space of creative ideas, leading to more original ideas. In the second study, we examined the ability of a design team to use multiscreen analysis – a method borrowed from the Theory of Inventive Problem- Solving (TRIZ) – to construct a discourse on the future uses of an innovative product. Results suggest that the team was able to anticipate future evolutions of the technical artifact considered – which is the goal of the method in its classical form – but not to reappropriate this technique to imagine scenarios illustrating future uses of a product. We describe the consequences of these results for developing new methodologies for interventions in prospective ergonomics.L’ergonomie prospective est une modalité d’intervention ergonomique centrée sur l’anticipation des besoins et activités futurs, visant à assister les premières étapes du processus de conception innovante centrée utilisateurs. À ce jour, peu de propositions méthodologiques ont été formulées pour assister les interventions en ergonomie prospective, bien que ceci constitue un levier majeur pour une meilleure intégration de la conception centrée utilisateurs dans les projets d’innovation. Ainsi, les méthodes classiques de l’analyse des usages sont d’un intérêt limité lorsque le concepteur doit travailler avec des concepts de produit mal définis, car il peut s’avérer difficile de décrire les usages futurs du produit en question. Dans cet article, nous proposons que certaines méthodes de créativité, souvent utilisées pour résoudre des problèmes de nature technique dans le cadre de projets de conception, puissent être utilisées pour élaborer des scénarios spéculatifs portant sur l’usage futur d’un produit. Nous avons réalisé des simulations de réunions de conception portant sur l’anticipation des usages de différents produits et avons évalué, au travers de deux études, les effets de méthodes empruntées à deux paradigmes de créativité sur la capacité d’une équipe pluridisciplinaire de conception à formuler des scénarios d’usage futurs. La première étude visait à évaluer les apports de méthodes empruntées au paradigme du Creative Problem Solving (CPS) – le brainwriting et la matrice de découvertes – à la production de scénarios prospectifs d’usages. Elle fait suite à une étude qui montrait que ces méthodes n’avaient pas d’effet sur le nombre de scénarios produits ni sur le nombre d’idées relatives aux usagers futurs du produit ou à leurs activités. Nous montrons ici, cependant, que ces méthodes permettent de mieux structurer la dynamique d’exploration de l’espace créatif, et d’aboutir à des idées plus originales. Dans la seconde étude, nous avons examiné la capacité d’une équipe de concepteurs à exploiter l’analyse multi-écrans – une méthode empruntée à la théorie de résolution des problèmes inventifs (TRIZ) – pour construire un discours sur les usages futurs d’un produit innovant. Les résultats suggèrent que l’équipe était en mesure d’anticiper des évolutions de l’artefact technique – ce qui correspond à la finalité initiale de la méthode – mais pas de se réapproprier l’outil pour imaginer des scénarios illustrant les usages futurs possibles du produit. Nous décrivons enfin les conséquences de ces résultats pour élaborer de nouvelles méthodologies d’intervention en ergonomie prospective

Tableau de manipulation pour patients atteints de la maladie d'Alzheimer

L'invention TIPATSMA (Tableau Interactif pour Patients atteints de Troubles Sévères de la Maladie d'Alzheimer) se rapporte à un tableau interactif destiné aux patients atteints de la maladie d'Alzheimer