Reducing the "Information Gap" Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Co-operative Design Phases

This paper aims to describe a particular role of annotations as co-operative artefacts in engineering design. In co-operative processes, where achieving a shared understanding between the participants from different domains is crucial, sharing the decisions and argumentations which lead to a solution is as important as sharing the solution itself. In our case study, we describe what we call an "information gap" between the asynchronous phase, when individual decisions are made, and the design review, when the solution is evaluated, and collective thinking influences the decisions. Then, within a conceptual design scenario, we show how semantic annotations can create a shared environment to help to reduce this gap, where all actors are able to elicit domain-specific constraints and engage discussions on design solution during the asynchronous phase.semantic annotation; engineering design; design communication; collaborative tool

An annotation based approach to support design communication

The aim of this paper is to propose an approach based on the concept of annotation for supporting design communication. In this paper, we describe a co-operative design case study where we analyse some annotation practices, mainly focused on design minutes recorded during project reviews. We point out specific requirements concerning annotation needs. Based on these requirements, we propose an annotation model, inspired from the Speech Act Theory (SAT) to support communication in a 3D digital environment. We define two types of annotations in the engineering design context, locutionary and illocutionary annotations. The annotations we describe in this paper are materialised by a set of digital artefacts, which have a semantic dimension allowing express/record elements of technical justifications, traces of contradictory debates, etc. In this paper, we first clarify the semantic annotation concept, and we define general properties of annotations in the engineering design context, and the role of annotations in different design project situations. After the description of the case study, where we observe and analyse annotations usage during the design reviews and minute making, the last section is dedicated to present our approach. We then describe the SAT concept, and define the concept of annotation acts. We conclude with a description of basic annotation functionalities that are actually implemented in a software, based on our approach

French College Students’ Sports Practice and Its Relations with Stress, Coping Strategies and Academic Success

College students at university have to face several stress factors. Although sports practice has been considered as having beneficial effects upon stress and general health, few studies have documented its influence on this specific population. The aim of this comparative study was to determine whether the intensity of the college students’ sports practice (categorized into three groups: rare, regular, or intensive) would influence their levels of stress and self-efficacy, their coping strategies, and their academic success/failure. Three self-completion questionnaires were administered to 1071 French freshmen during their compulsory medical visit at the preventive medicine service of the university. Results indicated that students with intensive sport practice reported lower scores of general stress, academic stress, and emotion-focused coping strategies, and higher scores of self-efficacy than those with rare practice. However, the proportion of successful students did not differ significantly between the three groups of sports practice

Analysis of the co-design activity: influence of a mixed artifact and contribution of the gestural function in a spatial augmented reality environment

International audienceAugmented reality provides new possibilities to propose environments where the designers can take advantage of the physicality of the artifacts while keeping the versatility of digital environments. Mixed objects can therefore provide new media in the interactions between stakeholders. Besides, the increasing interest in user participation in early design phases is limited by the poor representations or the expensive mock ups to be provided in design meetings. Therefore, understanding the role of these mixed artifacts by analyzing and characterizing the interactions is crucial to the development of both design methods and environments. By focusing on multimodal interactions, we aim at providing new results in terms of the design process, in particular by studying the contribution of the gesture in collaborative product co-creativity sessions but also by understanding the role of these multiple interactions in an augmented reality environment

Analyse d’un dispositif de type fab-lab dans un contexte industriel

National audience— L'émergence des Fab Labs facilite l'accès à la fabrication numérique et au prototypage depuis quelques années. Cette émergence s'accompagne du mouvement des makers au travers du Do It Yourself. Parallèlement les grandes entreprises s'intéressent de plus en plus à ces nouveaux lieux pour la simplicité de mise en oeuvre de leurs outils et pour leur ouverture quant au partage de connaissance et au compagnonnage. Cependant ce phénomène n'a pas encore pénétré concrètement les entreprises de manière significative. Nous pensons que l'utilisation de ce type de lieu dans les phases de conception amont pourrait aider les phases de créativité en favorisant l'exploration des espaces de possibles, en générant plus de concepts ou en les rendant plus robustes et en permettant la confrontation des divers points de vues plus rapidement. Le maquettage ne serait donc plus réservé aux services de prototypage ou à l'ingénierie ; il serait rendu accessible aux différents acteurs tels que le design, le marketing et l'ergonomie. En associant ce type de lieu à une démarche inspirée du design thinking, le Groupe SEB créé un nouveau dispositif pour accompagner ses équipes d'innovation. Ces équipes multi-expertises vont pouvoir travailler en collaboration afin de générer des idées via des outils de créativité. Ces idées vont être décrites pour se transformer en concepts qui seront ensuite matérialisées pour devenir des démonstrateurs. I. INTRODUCTION Depuis l'apparition des ordinateurs, les technologies numériques n'ont cessé de progresser. L'accès à ces technologies dans le domaine de la fabrication grand public est rendu possible avec l'apparition des ateliers de fabrication numérique et plus particulièrement des Fab Labs. L'apparition des Fab Labs va donner un regain à la culture Do it Yourself au travers du mouvement des Makers. Les grandes entreprises s'intéressent de plus en plus à ces ateliers de fabrication numérique et à la culture qui les accompagne. Pour l'entreprise, les Fab Labs sont assimilés à un outil d'innovation ouverte facilitant l'accès aux dispositifs de prototypage rapide. Dans l'ouvrage de Fabien Eychenne consacré à l'étude de l'émergence des Fab Labs en France [1], une typologie permet de distinguer trois types de Fab Labs : grand public, éducationnels et privés business. Les Fab Labs de type privés business sont étudiés dans cet article

Coping among Students: Development and validation of an exploratory measure

Students is a very specific population according to their manner to cope with stress. A coping questionnaire for students was developed and administered to 1100 French students at the beginning of the term (T1). Principal Component Analysis of responses, followed by varimax rotations, yielded three factors accounting for 50.5% of the total variance. Factors were identified as seeking social support, avoidance/emotion-focused coping and festive-addictive coping. Associations were observed between scores on these factors and a general coping scale (WCC-R), personal variables measured at the same time (T1), neuroticism, self-esteem, substance use, and four stress factors, as well as variables measured at the end of the term (T2), somatic symptoms, depressive symptoms, eating disorders, and life satisfaction. It would be very interesting to develop the students' personal competencies, so that they are learning how to adopt functional strategies of coping rather than of the harmful kind

What is the “Source” of Open Source Hardware?

What “open source” means once applied to tangible products has been so far mostly addressed through the light of licensing. While this approach is suitable for software, it appears to be over-simplistic for complex hardware products. Whether such a product can be labelled as open source is not only a question of licence but a question of documentation, i.e. what is the information that sufficiently describes it? Or in other words, what is the “source” of open source hardware? To date there is no simple answer to this question, leaving large room for interpretation in the usage of the term. Based on analysis of public documentation of 132 products, this paper provides an overview of how practitioners tend to interpret the concept of open source hardware. It specifically focuses on the recent evolution of the open source movement outside the domain of electronics and DIY to that of non-electronic and complex open source hardware products. The empirical results strongly indicate the existence of two main usages of open source principles in the context of tangible products: publication of product-related documentation as a means to support community-based product development and to disseminate privately developed innovations. It also underlines the high variety of interpretations and even misuses of the concept of open source hardware. This reveals in turn that this concept may not even be clear to practitioners and calls for more narrowed down definitions of what has to be shared for a product to be called open source. This article contributes towards this effort through the definition of an open source hardware lifecycle summarizing the observed approaches to open source hardware.DFG, 325093850, Open Access Publizieren 2017 - 2018 / Technische Universität Berli

A participatory design approach based on the use of scenarios for improving local design methods in developing countries

Working paperOver the past few years, the use of scenarios in participatory design has proved its worth. It has resulted in some interesting tools for capturing the context of use. However, these approaches have been almost exclusively developed and used for software design. In this article, we shall describe the development of scenarios in the specific context of tropical food processing equipment design in developing countries. As well as exploring this original field of application, this article raises fundamental questions about scenario use, taking us beyond the limited framework of the proposed application. We shall outline a methodological framework for structuring the deployment of scenarios according to the different design phases: the COSU method. This method implements the scenario concept in an original way. It comprises four types of scenario whose aim is to create interaction between designers and users in order to foster a shared understanding of both the problem and the solutions. We shall also show that the scenarios are objects that mediate the user-designer dialogue that is of prior importance in the context of developing countries. The applicability of the method is presented through various case study examples

S'OCCUPER DES ENFANTS, EST-CE UNE QUESTION DE GENRE ?

International audienceCe texte a pour objectif de présenter les différents niveaux des inégalités de genre qui entrent en jeu dans un domaine où les relations de service organisent les échanges entre les professionnels et le public accueilli. À partir d’une étude sur les trajectoires de prise en charge d’enfants placés et de différents matériaux permettant d’observer les pratiques professionnelles dans le système de la protection de l’enfance, les auteurs mettent en évidence les conséquences d’une distribution fortement inégalitaire des rôles des hommes et des femmes dans les métiers de la protection de l’enfance ainsi que les mécanismes à l’oeuvre qui différencient l’orientation du public accueilli selon le sexe des enfants, les menant à réfléchir à la place du genre dans les pratiques professionnelles auprès de l’enfance protégée