Gearing up!

Abstract

When physical products become increasingly digitally connected, the traditional design space of an industrial designer becomes a blend of physical and digital elements. As a consequence of this evolution, products become a network of tangible artifacts and intangible services. While this opens a lot of design opportunities, it becomes challenging to keep track of the user and system interactions during the ideation process. Therefore, there is a need to revise the design ideation and conceptualisation tools available to design products and systems that allow interaction with both digital and physical product elements. Starting by identifying the challenges currently faced by designers, the research presented in this paper introduces and compares two creativity support tools that focus on the generation and definition of connected products. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the comparison results in a set of requirements of what a creativity support tool for connected products concept generation should consist of in order to be useful for industrial designers.

To Support Iot Collaborative Expressiveness on the Shop Floor

“…It is relevant to address this gap because designing and ideating with IoT technologies presents a new interactive paradigm (Dibitonto et al, 2018) that requires a different approach than with other technologies. IoT presents a combination of digital and physical elements (Roeck et al, 2014) which increases the complexity of IoT solution development (Udoh and Kotonya, 2018).…”

“…An alternate approach is to provide users with support tools that help them define and structure IoT ideas and concepts. For example, De Roeck et al (2014) presented a study comparing two different notation systems for IoT to support designers: the tangible business process modelling (tBPM) and Lillidots. On one hand, the tBPM is a set of tangibles that participants can use to create an overview of the system in the form of a process model.…”

“…On the other hand, Lillidot is a method that facilitates the creation of ideas by considering digital aspects in a structured way. However, unlike languages such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) or Object Modeling Language (OML) neither of these two notation tools are intended "to result in the description of a software system" (Roeck et al, 2014).…”