scholarly journals Taking into Account Users’ Perceptions in the Design Process: Principles to Create a Digital Design Tool

Author(s):  
Renato Fonseca Livramento Da Silva ◽  
Angelina Dias Leão Costa ◽  
Guillaume Thomann

AbstractUser Centered Design approach is used in many sectors and appropriated by many design teams to defend principles of products adapted to the final users. In the Architectural and Industrial Design disciplines, architects and designers defend principles that could be able to create spaces, public areas or innovated products that are closer as possible as the user behavior. The issue is still the complexity of the user perception and the variability of its interpretation of the environment. The research method used in this research is to combine Universal Design and Usability approaches to be able to extract one first list of principles. The combination of this list with the five human sensorial systems identified in the literature give the structure of a tool that can be proposed to projectists like architects and industrial designers to better consider user perception during the designing process. The result of the research is the proposition of a software coupled with a user friendly interface dedicated to architects and industrial designer. It has the aim to simplify the organization of the early phases of the design process, taking into account designers and architects design priorities and integrating the final user specific sensorial situation.

Author(s):  
Carolynn J. Walthall ◽  
Srikanth Devanathan ◽  
Lorraine Kisselburgh ◽  
Karthik Ramani ◽  
E. Daniel Hirleman ◽  
...  

Wikis, freely editable collections of web pages, are showing potential for a flexible documentation and communication tool for collaborative design tasks. They also provide a medium that can be further transformed by properly understanding both the need for flexibility as well as support for design thinking early in the design process. The purpose of this work is to analyze the different dimensions of the wiki from a communication perspective as applicable to design. With a focus on communication in design, we will explore the advantages and disadvantages of using wikis in student engineering design teams. Our ultimate goal is to better support the design process while exploiting the potential for increasing the shared understanding among teams using a wiki. By introducing a wiki in a globally distributed product development course, students gain hands-on experience in using wikis as a design tool. Feedback from students will be collected through questionnaires and used to improve and transform the wiki as a support tool for communication during early design collaboration.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Saadet Zeynep Bacınoğlu ◽  
Luka Piskorec ◽  
Toni Kotnik

Author(s):  
Mark Goudswaard ◽  
Ben Hicks ◽  
Linda Newnes

Transdisciplinary (TD) working offers the potential to bring together potentially disparate elements of engineering projects permitting them to concomitantly be addressed on empirical, pragmatic, normative and purposive levels. Whilst the importance and potential benefits of working in this manner are widely accepted, a key inhibitor to the adoption and embedding of TD working in practice is the variety and diversity of design tools employed and their relative levels of ability to support TD working. To explore what can be thought of as the enabling or inhibiting roles of design tools, this paper appraises common design tools and classifies them according to the level of transdisciplinary working that they permit. This is achieved by considering the capturable level of design rationale for each design tool as per Jantsch and contextualising each within the design process. The discussion considers how these findings are reflected in practice and how chains of particular tools could be employed to support TD working across the different phases of the design process. In total 41 tools are appraised with 6 acting as enablers of interdisciplinary working but none identified as truly TD. Most notably, a much greater proportion of TD enabling design tools are available to support the early phases of design. Further work might consider how education can be used to ensure effective use of current design tools and how knowledge transfer can and should be, applied to enable use of TD tool chains in industry.


Author(s):  
Danny Sale ◽  
Jason Jonkman ◽  
Walt Musial

This paper describes the adaptation of a wind turbine performance code for use in the development of a general use design tool and optimization method for stall-regulated horizontal-axis hydrokinetic turbine rotors. The rotor optimization tool couples a modern genetic algorithm and blade-element momentum performance code in a user friendly graphical-user-interface that efficiently automates the arduous design process for stall-regulated rotors. This optimization method calculates the optimal chord, twist, and hydrofoil distributions which maximize the hydrodynamic efficiency while ensuring that the rotor exhibits power regulation via hydrodynamic stall and avoids cavitation. Optimizing a rotor for maximum hydrodynamic efficiency does not necessarily create a turbine with the lowest cost of energy, but maximizing the efficiency is an excellent criterion to use as a first pass in the design process. With satisfactory results, two conceptual rotors were designed to test the capabilities of this optimization method.


2015 ◽  
Vol 809-810 ◽  
pp. 865-870
Author(s):  
Manuela Roxana Dijmărescu ◽  
Dragoș Iliescu ◽  
Marian Gheorghe

Various architectures exposing certain phases of the design process have been developed. A closer analysis of the presented timelines is leading more to postpone the design solution rather than advancing it in the early phases. This paper advances a new architecture for the design process with the main emphasize on the product functional design, based on functional-constructive knowledge stored in databases, and on the principle of selecting design solutions in an incipient phase and developing them during the further design process stages.


2013 ◽  
Vol 397-400 ◽  
pp. 802-805
Author(s):  
Lei Wei ◽  
Sha Liu ◽  
Yue Yuan ◽  
Yun Qi Wang

In view of sofa product’s features such as demand of great types and inefficient design, the paper presents a method of parametric design on the simple sofa based on RhinoScript. With analysis of simple sofa’s modeling characteristics, the model of simple sofa could be presented by different parameters. Then models of different sizes and appearance styles could be created easily and quickly by inputting different parameters. This method improves the design efficiency and avoids industrial designers’ repeat work. The design process of a kind of simple sofa testified the method and a series of sofa proposals were easily generated.


Author(s):  
Margaret Wong ◽  
Akudasuo Ezenyilimba ◽  
Alexandra Wolff ◽  
Tyrell Anderson ◽  
Erin Chiou ◽  
...  

Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions often involve a need to complete tasks in hazardous environments. In such situations, human-robot teams (HRT) may be essential tools for future USAR missions. Transparency and explanation are two information exchange processes where transparency is real-time information exchange and explanation is not. For effective HRTs, certain levels of transparency and explanation must be met, but how can these modes of team communication be operationalized? During the COVID-19 pandemic, our approach to answering this question involved an iterative design process that factored in our research objectives as inputs and pilot studies with remote participants. Our final research testbed design resulted in converting an in-person task environment to a completely remote study and task environment. Changes to the study environment included: utilizing user-friendly video conferencing tools such as Zoom and a custom-built application for research administration tasks and improved modes of HRT communication that helped us avoid confounding our performance measures.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Alexandra Bloesch-Paidosh ◽  
Kristina Shea

Abstract When designing for Additive Manufacturing (AM), designers often need assistance in breaking out of their conventional manufacturing mind-set. Previously, Blösch-Paidosh and Shea (2019) derived Design Heuristics for AM (DHAM) to assist designers in doing this during the early phases of the design process. This work proposes a set of 25 multi-modal cards and objects to accompany each of the Design Heuristics for AM and studies their effect through a series of controlled, novice user studies conducted using both teams and individuals who redesign a city E-Bike. The resulting AM concepts are analyzed in terms of the quantity of design modifications relevant for AM, AM-flexibility, novelty, and variety. It is found that the DHAM cards and objects increase the inclusion of AM concepts, AM modifications, and the unique capabilities of AM in the concepts generated by both individuals and teams. They also increase the creativity of the concepts generated by both individuals and teams, as measured through a series of defined metrics. Further, the objects in combination with the cards are more effective at stimulating the generation of a wider variety of designs than the cards alone. Future work will focus on studying the use of the DHAM cards and objects in an industrial setting.


Author(s):  
C. P. Huang ◽  
F. W. Liou ◽  
J. J. Malyamakkil ◽  
W. F. Lu

Abstract This paper presents an advisory conceptual design tool for mechanical transmission systems. Space consideration was taken into account during the design process. A prototype function tree was built in the form of knowledge-based system to transfer a designer’s idea into a set of mechanical components. An advisory expert system was also developed to help a designer in decision making. As an example, a packaging machine is designed using the developed system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (21) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Fatoş ÇAKICIOĞLU İLHAN ◽  
Meryem YALÇIN

Aim: Increased awareness of creating design solutions that can meet the social and psychological needs of patients in healthcare spaces highlights research on the psychology of place-patient/ doctors/healthcare staff. Therefore, patient-oriented health space designs that provide a sense of trust and satisfaction to patients – along with a supportive approach to their treatment – are the points of departure in this study, while understanding the effects and experiences of design on patients. Environmental graphic design elements (photographs, illustrations, typography, and pictograms) in the interiors of hospitals emerge as the factors that shape the patient's spatial experience, such as orientation, information, and perception of a space. In this study, the effects of such design elements on user perception in health spaces were investigated, and these design criteria that play a role in determining and actively interacting with the environmental graphic design elements in hospital spaces are encountered. Based on the abovementioned facts, this research aims to contribute to the graphics in health spaces in the context of environmental graphic design, with experience covering both fields. Method: Three hospitals, which are sufficient in terms of environmental graphic design elements and have differences between them, were determined as the research places. The elements in these hospitals were photographed and surveyed on user groups (patients, doctors, health personnel) who experienced the places continuously or temporarily. Results and Conclusion: It was demonstrated by statistical data that the elements in the investigated places could not provide the expected effects as a whole. As a result, environmental graphic design applications that have a supportive design understanding in hospital spaces should have a holistic language, and that design understanding can only be demonstrated with the cooperation of architects, interior designers, graphic designers, and industrial designers.


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