Frédéric Segonds

Avatar-mediated creativity

An important challenge today is to support creativity while enabling geographically distant people to work together. In line with the componential theory of creativity, self-perception theory and recent research on the Proteus Effect, we investigate how avatars, which are virtual representations of the self, may be a medium for stimulating creativity. For this purpose, we conducted two studies with a population of engineering students. In the first study, 114 participants responded to online surveys in order to identify what a creative avatar may look like. This enabled us to select avatars representing inventors, which were perceived as creative by engineering students, and neutral avatars. In the second study, 54 participants brainstormed in groups of 3, in 3 different conditions: in a control face-to-face situation, in a virtual environment while embodying neutral avatars and in a virtual environment with inventor avatars. The results show that inventor avatars led to higher performance in fluency and originality of ideas. Moreover, this benefit proved to endure over time since participants allocated to inventor avatars also performed better in a subsequent face-to-face brainstorming. The prospects of using avatars for enhancing creativity-relevant processes are discussed in terms of theoretical and applicative implications. Investigated the impact of virtual environment on collaborative creativity.Designed avatars corresponding to engineers representation of a creative person.Tested the influence of creative avatars on creativity processes with engineers.Creative avatars increased performance (quantity and originality of ideas).

Collaborative Design Tools: A Comparison between Free Software and PLM Solutions in Engineering Education

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, whose implementation is perceived as complex. Nowadays, industrial scenarios encourage companies to adopt PLM solutions, even if, sometimes, they can’t understand the benefits. On the other hand, many free solutions with comparable functionalities are developed, which have been increasingly successful.

Proposition of a PLM tool to support textile design

The key stakes in the implementation of a new PLM tool for the early stages of design in textile industry. Following a comprehensive overview of existing PLM solutions and of the suitability of their functions to the world of textile design, we mapped and quantified the collaborative exchanges involved in the design of a textile product in the Devanlay company, based on a series of semi-directed interviews.The technical data which must be managed by the future system. The emergence of PLM tools, following increasing competition between businesses requires a fine-grained analysis of user needs, in terms of collaboration and exchanges of technical data before designing and deploying the system.The field work that allowed us to specify and test some useful solutions to implement a PLM solution. This research work opens many different prospects. The current climate of economic competition forces businesses to adapt more than ever to the expectations of their customers. Faced with new challenges, practices in textile design have evolved in order to be able to manage projects in new work environments. After presenting a state of the art overview of collaborative tools used in product design and making functional comparison between PLM solutions, our paper proposes a case study for the development and testing of a collaborative platform in the textile industry, focusing on the definition of early stages of design needs. The scientific contributions presented in this paper are a state of the art of current PLM solutions and their application in the field of textile design; and a case study where we will present, define, and test the mock-up of a collaborative tool to assist the early stages, based on identified intermediary representations.

Early stages of apparel design: how to define collaborative needs for PLM and fashion?

Companies are faced with increasing challenges in their own environment. In several areas of the industry, but also among the suppliers, more and more competitors emerge. Companies react to this pressure by trying to implement new technologies for their products and offering more innovative products to successfully face direct competition. Overall, globalisation put pressure on companies in terms of innovation, costs and time to market. This climate of economic competition forces businesses to adapt to the expectations of their customers. To achieve this change, it becomes necessary amongst other things to reduce design time. Thus, practices in apparel design have evolved in order to be able to manage projects in new work environments. After presenting a literature review of collaborative functionalities used in product design, our paper presents an illustration of a case study for Product Lifecycle Management research in the apparel industry, focusing on the definition of needs in terms of collaborative functions to support the design of apparel products, in an industrial context.

Scientometric Study of Product Lifecycle Management International Conferences: A Decade Overview

PLM International Conference proceedings focussing on the field of Product Lifecycle Management have made a lot of advancements in the last 12 years. Since 2003, 11 conferences on PLM have taken place but a systematic analysis of the evolution in PLM literature is, however, not available at the moment. This study proposes an analysis of the growth of the scientific literature on PLM over a 10 year period using standard bibliometric techniques. A total of 565 scientific papers have been examined to find out about the growth of literature, authorship pattern, geographical & organizational distribution of papers, citation count and most frequently occurring keywords. The findings of this study give an insight into the evolution of literature on PLM by means of quantitative & qualitative analysis and provide useful information to scientists wishing to undertake work in this field.

PLM and architectural rehabilitation: a framework to improve collaboration in the early stages of design

Recent evolutions in French law regarding accessibility of public buildings have prompted a need for methods and tools to rehabilitate such structures in order to make them accessible to disabled users. Architectural rehabilitation is an exceedingly complex design process, in particular, because of a legal framework which strongly impacts on the structure of collaboration, and of the need to take into account the characteristics of existing buildings. In this paper, we describe a participatory design methodology applied in the rehabilitation of a School of Engineering in France in order to improve its accessibility, and describe the basic functionalities of a software tool to assist collaborative engineering in architectural redesign projects.

Using avatars to tailor ideation process to innovation strategy

To face innovation challenges of the twenty-first century, companies should learn from proven successful strategies and draw on technological evolutions as well. Our proposal consists in aligning ideation to innovation strategies through the use of avatars in a virtual world. On the basis of the Persona method and the Proteus effect, we design avatars’ appearance so as to implement a Need-seeker or a Technology-driver innovation strategy. To test the effectiveness of this avatar-mediated innovation tool, we conducted an experiment in a French company. Two groups of highly qualified employees from the innovation department had to find applications for smart windows in public transportation. Both groups experienced immersion in a virtual transportation situation: one group embodied avatars resembling Inventors, whereas the other group embodied Personas representing users of public transportation. As expected, avatars’ appearance proved to influence the creative production: the Inventor condition led to a techno-centered ideation profile, oriented toward technological solutions, while the Persona condition led to more user-centered, needs-oriented ideas. Consistently, Inventors’ production tended to be better evaluated through industrial criteria and Personas’ production tended to be better evaluated by transportation users. We discuss the use of avatar-mediated creativity as a strategic tool for companies seeking to innovate.

Social identity cues to improve creativity and identification in face-to-face and virtual groups

This research draws on the social identity approach to investigate group performance in face-to-face and virtual brainstorming settings. In particular, we display Social Identity Cues (SIC) on participants or on avatars to foster group membership. We compare four conditions in a factorial design: Brainstorming in Face-to-face or Virtual setting, With or Without SIC. Seventy-two students belonging to a population with a strong social identity participated in the experiment, using their traditional clothing as SIC. The results show that the presence of SIC led to increased creative performance both in face-to-face and virtual settings. SIC also increased group identification, but only in the virtual environment. These results highlight the potential of avatars to support teamwork in a meaningful way. Traditional clothing of a specific student group acts as social identity cues.Face-to-face and avatar-mediated electronic brainstorming are compared.Impact of social identity cues is examined in face-to-face and virtual groups.Social identity cues improved performance both in real and virtual settings.

An illustrated glossary of ambiguous PLM terms used in discrete manufacturing

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a strategic product-centric, lifecycle-oriented and information-driven business approach that strives to integrate people and their inherent practices, processes, and technologies, both within and across functional areas of the extended enterprise from inception to disposal. The integration of people relies on the harmonisation of domain-specific glossaries by standardising a universal PLM vocabulary. So far, unfortunately, there is no PLM standard vocabulary. Therefore, the tremendous amount of knowledge that is continually brought forward by academic research studies, industrial practices and computer-aided applications causes semantic ambiguities. This paper consists of an illustrated glossary and a conceptual map. The glossary identifies, discusses, clarifies and illustrates ambiguous terms used in discrete manufacturing. The conceptual map finally underlines the logical flow of refereed definitions.

Deployment of Knowledge Management in a PLM Environment: A Software Integrator Case Study

The past years have seen growing investments in the area of PLM by several industries. In today’s industrial production, PLM is an essential tool to cope with the challenges of more demanding global competition and ever-shortening product lifecycles. Complex products require collaboration of large specialist networks. Knowledge Management (KM) can be apprehended in two manners: the defensive manner builds the stock of knowledge to face the departures of personnel, or, the offensive manner sees in the knowledge development an advisability to generate new products. The link between PLM and KM is interesting as it can help answering “on field” problems. In this paper we first make a state of the art of knowledge and KM in a PLM context. Then we propose a methodology to deploy KM in the particular case of a software integrator. Finally, we propose an experimental protocol that will allow us to improve a tool demonstrator in an agile way.