Serena Graziosi

Prototyping strategies for multisensory product experience engineering

The paper deals with prototyping strategies aimed at supporting engineers in the design of the multisensory experience of products. It is widely recognised that the most effective strategy to design it is to create working prototypes and analyse user’s reactions when interacting with them. Starting from this consciousness, we will discuss of how virtual reality (VR) technologies can support engineers to build prototypes suitable to this aim. Furthermore we will demonstrate how VR-based prototypes do not only represent a valid alternative to physical prototypes, but also a step forward thanks to the possibility of simulating and rendering multisensory and real-time modifiable interactions between the user and the prototype. These characteristics of VR-based prototypes enable engineers to rapidly test with users different variants and to optimise the multisensory experience perceived by them during the interaction. The discussion is supported both by examples available in literature and by case studies we have developed over the years on this topic. Specifically, in our research we have concentrated on what happens in the physical contact between the user and the product. Such contact strongly influences the user’s impression about the product.

An inspection system to master dimensional and technological variability of fashion-related products

HighlightsInspection system for measuring the face form angle and pantoscopic angle of spectacles.Low-cost measurement system based on computer vision.Methodology for controlling the variability of fashion-related products tested on a real industrial case study. Innovation of fashion-related products implies the continuous search for new and appealing shapes and materials in a short period of time due to the seasonality of the market. The design and manufacturing of such products have to deal with a dimensional variability as a consequence of the new shapes. An additional difficulty concerns properly forecasting the technological behaviour of the new materials in relation to the manufacturing process phases. The control of dimensional variations requires time and resource intensive activities. Humans manual and visual inspection solutions are more common than automatic ones for performing such control, where skilled operators are typically the only ones capable of immediately facing non-standard situations. The full control of such variations is even more subtle and mandatory in the field of spectacles, which are fashion-related products and also medical devices. This paper describes an inspection system developed to monitor the dimensional variations of a spectacles frame during the manufacturing process. We discuss the methodological approach followed to develop the system, and the experimental campaign carried out to test its effectiveness. The system intends to be an alternative to current inspection practices used in the field, and also to provide a methodological approach to enable engineers to systematically study the correlations existing among the frame main functional and dimensional parameters, the material behaviour and the technological variables of the manufacturing process. Hence, the system can be considered a method to systematically acquire and formalise new knowledge. The inspection system consists of a workbench equipped with four high-quality commercial webcams that are used to acquire orthogonal-view images of the front of the frame. A software module controls the system and allows the automatic processing of the images acquired, in order to extract the dimensional data of the frame which are relevant for the analysis. A case study is discussed to demonstrate the system performances.

Reverse engineering of interactive mechanical interfaces for product experience design

Designing physical interfaces, like the doors of consumer products, able to elicit a positive experience when interacting with them, is now becoming a key priority for design teams. One of the main difficulties of this activity consists of translating all the qualitative perceptual feedback that can be captured from the customers into quantitative specifications. Performing this translation is not an easy task since there are still no effective tools, methodologies or approaches able to guide designers in accomplishing this goal. To overcome this lack a reverse engineering-based approach is proposed. This one guides designers towards the modelling, parameterisation and reproduction of the behaviour of the product interface to be redesigned, within a multisensory virtual environment. The intent is to let the user experience different behaviours in order to ask them to identify the desired one or to express preferences for updating it in real-time according to indications provided. At the same time a detailed physics model, built by the designer, is used to convert this desired behaviour, into detailed quantitative design specifications. The method is defined as a reverse engineering one for two main reasons: first the new interaction is derived on the basis of the behaviour of an existing interface, taken as reference, and second a reverse engineering of the users perceptual preferences is applied to derive new specifications. A case study is discussed to demonstrate the method effectiveness and to highlight its limitations.

Digitalizing and capturing haptic feedback in virtual prototypes for User Experience design

The term User Experience (UX) is commonly associated with interactive computer-based systems. Companies operating in the consumer market are recently discovering the importance of designing UX, and in particular multisensory UX, of any kind of system, and not necessarily high-tech products. One of the most effective ways to design UX is to enable users interacting with the prototype of the system during the design process, and in particular already during its initial stages. These prototypes should provide the same experience occurring while interacting with the corresponding real product. To this aim Virtual Prototypes (VPs) may be effectively used, especially in the early design stages when the activities are still in progress and changes are frequent. Multisensory UX can be effectively designed through VPs only if all the senses involved in the real interaction are recreated into the virtual simulation. To date, despite a growing interest of research and industry in the development and use of VPs, many applications are still limited to visual and sound simulations. This paper focuses on the use of VPs to design multisensory UX, concentrating on the introduction of the sense of touch in the simulation. The methodological approach as well as the development of a case study are described in the paper.

Optimization of the Force Feedback of a Dishwasher Door Putting the Human in the Design Loop

The aim of the research work described in the paper is to enable designers to optimize the force feedback of a dishwasher door, in order to improve the user experience with the product at the moment of purchase. This is obtained by allowing the user to test the product since the beginning of the design process through the use of interactive Virtual Prototypes based on haptic technologies. A commercially available dishwasher is used as case study. The mechanical system producing the force feedback is modeled in a multi-domain simulation environment, and in parallel a parameterized simplified simulation is made available to the user through a force feedback haptic device. That feedback can be easily modified on user’s requests and the desired behavior can be sent back to the multi-domain simulation, which optimizes the system to behave in the desired way. How to correctly involve humans into the proposed design framework is also discussed, highlighting their key role in determining product characteristics.

Integrated Model for Technology Assessment and Expected Evolution: A Case Study in the Chilean Mining Industry

In this paper a 9-step method is proposed to study the evolution of technical systems. Merging the potential of TRIZ and patent analysis, a structured approach is defined to properly analyse the state of the art of a technology and retrieve useful insights to identify and structure new development strategies. Past-present evolutionary dynamics are quantitatively described, while indications for new possible development scenarios can be also extrapolated. Starting from a detailed breakdown of the technology under analysis, a list of evaluation parameters is defined to classify inventions and thus monitor the technology advancements by means of the TRIZ Laws of Engineering Systems Evolution. The aim of this study is to foster the diffusion of more reliable and systematic approaches to innovation especially in those industrial sectors where high risks and investment costs tend to favour short-term technological advances rather than long-term ones. Two case studies were developed within the context of the mining industry. Specifically, the study is part of a research project founded by the Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO) whose objective is to support companies of the Atacama region, in the identification of new technological opportunities to renew their production process.

Dishwasher history and its role in modern design

The fundamental steps in the development of electrical technologies have determined their strong diffusion in several applications that were previously hand operated and controlled. The household appliance industry is one of the sectors where this permeation had the major effects, fostering a continuous search for new design perspectives. Capturing such product evolution is fundamental in order to preserve knowledge coming from past experiences, which could act as a stimulus for new technical solutions or socio-economic analysis. Starting from the description of the dishwasher historical evolution, in this paper an approach to preserve such precious knowledge is presented: a functional representation of that knowledge is proposed end its role in modern design is discussed.

Combining aesthetics and engineering specifications for fashion-driven product design: A case study on spectacle frames

Abstract The successful combination of aesthetic and engineering specifications is a long-standing issue. The literature reports some examples where this problem was achieved developing tools to support the automatic generation of new product shapes, embedding and linking predefined rule-sets. Notwithstanding, these kinds of tools are effective if and only if the relations among these specifications are known. Other complementary strategies act upstream by building a common ground: they aid in the formalisation of these specifications, fostering the use of a shared language and the same level of detail. This paper lies in between the previous approaches since its purpose is the description of a strategy to formalise the relations among aesthetic and engineering specifications and whose validities are not affected by the product variability. Indeed, fashion-driven products are subject to continuous innovations and changes. Therefore the identification of these predefined rule-sets is challenging. In detail, the paper objective is to build a high-level and long-lasting formalisation of these relations, based on topological and functional rules. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, we developed a case study in the eyewear industry. We started considering the spectacle-frame functionality and derived the high-level formulation linking aesthetic and engineering specifications. We used this formulation to generate an abstraction of the frame geometry, i.e., an archetype, to be used as a reference for the design of new collections. We implemented the archetype through a Matlab script, and we translated it into a design tool, to wit an Excel spreadsheet. The validity of both the archetype and the tool has been tested, in collaboration with an eyewear manufacturer, designing and manufacturing two new models of frames.

COLLEGO: An Interactive Platform for Studying Joint Action During an Ecological Collaboration Task

We describe the implementation and preliminary validation of an interactive platform – COLLEGO – to investigate joint action in a goal-oriented collaborative task. The platform records the interaction sequence of two partners alternating their leader/follower role. Two sensitized wooden surfaces are placed in front of each participant, who can use 6 cubes to build the tower. Any time a cube is picked/released, time stamp (ms) and position of selected objects are recorded. A case study showing how data are collected and analyzed to study dyad performance during the task is described. Finally, potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed.

Prototyping for the Product Experience: An Example in the Household Appliances Industry

The objective of the paper is to present a case study to exploit interactive Virtual Prototypes (iVPs) for investigating the way humans experience products. This method can be used for “prototyping” new product experiences, for monitoring users’ emotional reactions during the interaction and finally, for practically redesigning these experiences on the basis of the users’ feedback. Products considered here are domestic appliances, where the experience consists of the interaction with their physical interfaces.Copyright