Tuomo Tuikka

Facilitating designer‐customer communication in the World Wide Web

Introduces a way to design geographically distributed virtual prototyping, a new Internet technology, in order to facilitate designer‐customer communication in the product development of small electronic devices, such as mobile telephones. First, we will present our research in the concept design domain with a set of requirements focusing on communication between the designer and the customer. Second, a technique called “smart virtual prototyping” will be presented to elaborate on the virtual prototyping techniques to be used over the World Wide Web. Third, we will present the main ideas, architecture and selected software techniques of WebShaman, which is an application built to demonstrate how a distributed virtual prototyping system could support geographically distant designer‐customer communication. Finally, we discuss the possible impact of the distributed virtual prototyping approach on the WWW community.

Remote concept design from an activity theory perspective

This paper presents product concept design situations that occurred in computer aided concept design workshops. These situations were analysed using the concepts of activity theory to show how designers convey their understanding across distance. From this analysis, hypothetical user activity can be identified as an instrument of collaborative construction during design action. It is a common design object and mediates between the designers along with the future artifact. In order to support designers, future computer systems should therefore bridge the gap between physical and virtual design spaces. The concept of hypothetical user activity can be a means to organize such a system.

Augmenting virtual prototyping with physical objects

We define virtual prototype as a functional, photo realistic, and three dimensional digital model of a future hand held electronics product. Besides visualisation, product concept designers need to know the physical attributes of the product, such as dimensions, weight and surface texture. WebShaman Digiloop system augments digital virtual prototypes with physical objects in order to support such tangibility. A data glove is used to manipulate the virtual prototype and a physical mock-up of a concept prototype adds the physical aspects of the product concept to the virtual prototype. The user of this system can examine the functionality and features of the product concept as well as feel the dimensions, weight and texture, and move the prototype freely in physical space.

Searching requirements for a system to support cooperative concept design in product development

This paper addresses a systems design problem of what kind of support for cooperative concept design could be incorporated into a virtual reality prototyping system. We have studied and analysed how cooperative concept design is conducted in a series of multidisciplinary design meetings. This paper collects the analysis of that material and three interviews conducted simultaneously in industrial setting. The efforts of multidisciplinary designers in search toward a common understanding of the product concept during design process are reported. Thus, work done on the product concept and on coupling different interdisciplinary perspectives are studied. It is shown, e.g., that the concept can deviate very much in the early stages of concurrent engineering process. A lot of work is also required to manage the complexity of design and differing opinions of the goal. An understanding of how cooperation in these meetings was organized is presented with implications to further research with requirements of virtual reality prototyping systems.

Thinking Together in Concept Design for Future Products - Emergent Features for Computer Support

This paper points out how we can design systems in order to support concept designers who collaborate in creating new product concepts, small hand held electronics devices. An understanding of concept design is presented using concepts from Activity Theory to analyse design practice. The three levels of Activity: Activity, Action and Operation are discussed in order to revcel how Hypothctical User Activity is embedded as a mediator in Design Activity. This finding is used as an informing concept to design computer systems for synchronous collaboration of geographically distributed concept designers. Two exemplary systems are used to instantiate how the conceptual understanding has been useful for our systems design efforts. It is concluded that this treatment has lead us into consider CSCW applications as systems which mediate meaning.

Reliability through Cooperative Work in Software Testing

There are many papers pointing out ways to reach reliability in the product. Those papers are mostly dealing with the issue in quantitative manner. However, the reliability we in our everyday software production try to reach depends more or less on an agreement between people producing a product. This agreement is reached through cooperation during the process of software production. This is a paper to take a look at software testing and reliability with a view of cooperative work. Surely, all work is essentially cooperative work in that it depends upon others for its successful performance and software testing is no exception of this. Open question is what is the role of cooperative work in software testing and reliability of the product? The ideas presented here are examples based on the experience of the writer in the field of software testing. As a result cooperative work is seen to play essential role for reliability. Furthermore, a view of articulation work is suggested to be useful for further studies of cooperative work in software testing.

Implementing Open Authentication for Web Services with a Secure Memory Card

Open authentication protocols have become a standard solution to allow interfacing of third-party applications and websites. This paper presents a rationale for the use of secure memory cards with NFC-enabled service. A software application prototype is presented to show how a secure memory card can provide a portable authentication module to access web services. The prototype shows that it is possible to implement secure credential storage on a user-configurable secure memory card that supports an open authentication protocol. It provides protection against copying of the credentials and effectively frees the user from typing the passwords into the mobile device. Although the smart memory card is still a very new platform in mobile devices and not standardized in all aspects, we show that it provides a promising platform that is not bound to a specific operator or manufacturer.

Virtual reality prototyping in development and Web-based marketing of future electronics products

Virtual reality prototyping is a novel approach for the development and marketing of future products. In this technology, a designer or a customer and a full-digital product model are combined in a virtual reality world, where the features and properties of the products can be simulated by means of virtual reality techniques. Virtual reality prototyping aims at a realistic simulation by allowing a person to see, touch, hear and operate a future product before creation of any physical design model. A virtual prototype integrates different engineering domains with a product concept, which can be visualized, tested and evaluated in a shorter time with lower cost than earlier. In addition, the combination of virtual reality prototyping, the Internet and WWW technologies offers promising possibilities for distributed product design and for product marketing. Virtual reality prototyping is applicable in many diverse engineering tasks but, at its best, it can be seen as a comprehensive development framework combining all the activities from a product idea to customer support of the final output.