Anders Warell

Interdependency between average novelty, individual average novelty, and variety

Idea generation is an important part of the engineering design process, and therefore significant research efforts have focused on developing methods to support designers in generating ideas. A key factor is the measurement of ideation effectiveness. The effectiveness of idea generation methods can be measured using metrics such as novelty, variety, quantity, and quality. Average novelty (AN) of a set of ideas is also used as one of the ideation metrics. However, the interdependency between AN and variety has been given little attention. An investigation of the interdependency between these metrics is important to enhance our understanding of the metrics of ideation, and thereby to develop methods for improving ideation effectiveness. This article examines the interdependency between AN and variety. In addition, the metric ‘individual average novelty (IAN)’ has been introduced, and the interdependency between ‘IAN’ and variety has been investigated.

Fostering Automatic Control Students to Become Innovators

Today, innovation is a key word for many universities, as it constitutes an important part of most universities’ public and scientific outreach task. Many universities are striving to increase the number of innovations generated at the university. A common method is to provide various support for research projects e.g.; providing researchers with information about international patent rights (IPR), offering administrative or financial help concerning patent applications, giving entrepreneurship and start-up support, etc. However, fostering innovators and entrepreneurs can start already in undergraduate/graduate courses, i.e. long before a student potentially reaches the research level. We believe that key factors for success in this matter are diversity and freedom. A course that strives to promote innovation capability must allow for students with different backgrounds and different curricula to meet and work together, and must allow for students to freely use their current knowledge within new contexts. This is generally not a setting provided in traditional undergraduate/graduate courses. This article describes the execution and outcome of an graduate course “international Market-Driven Engineering (iMDE)” in which diversity and freedom are key factors. The course is international and multi-disciplinary in terms of students, teachers and subjects. Graduate students with prior knowledge in automatic control constitute one important part of the course population. We believe that the diversity amongst the students, and their freedom when it comes to both innovation process and product, provides a promising platform in which seeds of ideas can grow into conceptual prototypes that build a solid foundation for full-scale innovations. On of the iMDE- projects, the Elderly Accessible Chair, or EA Chair, with its automated scanning and automatic seat- provider functionality, is one concrete example of this.

Bringing the mobile context into industrial design and development

In this paper we discuss the dynamic nature of mobile usage, and how this impacts on design and evaluation, particularly in an industrial setting. We argue that current industry oriented design tools need to be extended to cater more effectively to the highly dynamic and context-dependent nature of mobile usage -- we suggest more focus should be put on doing instead of on being. In order to achieve this we suggest a lightweight design/insight tool developed to suit industrial practice: context cards. These cards allow designers, developers, and usability experts to perform lightweight explorations of the consequences of a range of mobile situations.

Interior aesthetics: an experience-focused approach for the design of brand-specific automotive identity

In this research, two objectives were pursued. Firstly, to develop an experience-focused approach to design, based on a framework for perceptual product experience, and, secondly, to test and verify the proposed methodology through an interior design study of the Hulme.F1 supercar. In the process, experience design criteria were developed, which served creative and evaluative purposes. The final design proposal was assessed by an external lead user group through a subjective qualitative-quantitative survey study. The evaluation suggested that targeted design intentions were successfully met with respect to visual product brand identity as well as visual-aesthetic coherence between interior and exterior design.

Good Taste vs Good Design : A tug of war in the light of Bling

ABSTRACT Some products are considered to be ‘bad taste’ and therefore of less value. However, if we focus on what a product does to and for its users, rather than on what a product is, we can disregard superficial statements based on taste, and instead reach a better understanding of design. This reasoning is based on the relationship between ‘good taste’ and ‘good design’, terms which are sometimes confused and treated as synonyms. In this paper we explore the tension between ‘good taste’ and ‘good design’, and how designers can use that tension in the design process. We consider ‘good taste’ to be rooted in a subjective context of inherent values, whereas ‘good design’ arises from competence and is based on professional skill. ‘Bad taste’ is here exemplified by products associated with the lifestyles of rap artists and the subculture of bling. Inspired by de Bonos PO (1972, 1973) we created a thought-provoking brief for a design workshop for students. In the context of a course on trends, industrial design students were given the task of exploring how bling products are perceived in everyday life and proposing future bling scenarios. Their views on bling were compatible with how bling is presented in the media. However, when the students began to consider what the product does rather than what it is, they were able to use bling as a source of creativity for their own bling projects. What other design opportunities are overlooked by regarding products as being ‘bad taste’?

Characteristics of Jewellery Design: An Initial Review

Previous studies in jewellery design have primarily focused on the techniques of the jewellery design process, such as the use of tools including computer aided design, rapid prototyping and other design technology. However, limited attention has been devoted to understanding the jewellery design practice itself, including methodologies and rationale of the work. Therefore, the focus of this position paper is to understand the nature of the practice, how designers reason about jewellery making, and how they create the knowledge they need in the design process. A literature review on the topic revealed that the characteristics of jewellery design can be described by three aspects; the practice of the jewellery designer, characteristics and rationale of jewellery designers, and knowledge creation in jewellery design. In conclusion, jewellery design can be understood as an intuitive practice with an artistically driven standpoint and experimentally based approach, focusing on resolving design challenges related to the object itself.

Design for the BOP and the TOP: Requirements Handling Behaviour of Designers

The base (BOP) and the top (TOP) of the world income pyramid represent the people living in poverty and the people from developed countries, respectively. In the approach of business development combined with poverty alleviation, the design of products for the BOP plays an important role. There is an urgent need to develop an understanding of the process of designing products for the BOP. Requirements handling is an important ingredient of a design process. This research, using a protocol study, examined the differences between the requirements handling behaviour of designers when they design a product for the BOP and TOP markets. We found differences between their requirements handling behaviour in terms of their attention to different topics of requirements, and their handling of solution-specific and solution-neutral requirements.

Conceptual Design of a Hydraulic Valve Train System

Variable valve train systems have been brought into focus during recent years as a means to decrease fuel consumption in tomorrow’s combustion engines. In this paper an integrated approach, called simulation driven experiments, is utilised in order to aid the development of such highly dynamic systems. Through the use of systematic design methodology, a number of feasible concepts are developed. Critical components are subsequently identified using simulation. In this approach, component behaviour is simulated and validated by measurements on prototype components. These models are unified with complete system models of hydraulically actuated valve trains. In the case of the valve trains systems studied here component models could be validated using comparably simple test set-ups. These models enable the determination of non-critical design parameters in an optimal sense. This results in a number of optimised concepts facilitating an impartial functional concept selection. (Less)

Remote assessment of intangible product experiences-challenges and implications

This paper presents two pilot studies done as part of the development of a future tool for remote customer assessment of intangible product experiences. There is a need from industry to better understand how customers perceive products in relation to other products. The aim is to provide industry and researchers with a new approach that is easier to work with and that is more reliable than existing traditional web surveys. In the first study a mock-up tool was emailed to international respondents. The second study was a situated usability study of a prototype version of the tool concerned with how the respondent interface might be developed further from experiences made in the first study. The findings of this paper present suggestions to how future remote product assessments could be made more efficient. The contribution of this paper is the characteristics and quality of a new assessment method. Results from qualitative respondent assessments of the tool indicated that this objective was achieved.