scholarly journals WHAT IS SUCCESSFUL PROTOTYPING? INSIGHTS FROM NOVICE DESIGNERS’ SELF-EVALUATION OF PROTOTYPING SUCCESS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3431-3440
Author(s):  
Camilla Arndt Hansen ◽  
Nuno Miguel Martins Pacheco ◽  
Ali Gürcan Özkil ◽  
Markus Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Design Teams ◽  
Fidelity Level ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Human Centered Design ◽  
Development Stages ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
Success Criteria ◽  
Novice Designers

AbstractPrototyping is essential for fuzzy front-end product development. The prototyping process answers questions about critical assumptions and supports design decisions, but it is often unstructured and context-dependent. Previously, we showed how to guide novice designers in early development stages with prototyping milestones. Here, we studied the prototyping success perceived by novice design teams. This was done in two steps: (1) teams were asked to assign each prototype to a milestone, a specific purpose, a fidelity level, and a human-centered design lens, and then evaluate the success using a predefined set of criteria. (2) Teams were interviewed about the success of the prototyping process, this time using self-chosen criteria. Results related to (1) show that teams perceived prototyping activities with respect to desirability and problem validation significantly less successful than prototyping activities towards feasibility and solution validation. Results related to (2) show that teams mostly chose success criteria related to how well prototypes supported communication, decision making, learning, and tangibility. This insight may be used to give priorities to further improvement of methods and guidance in these areas.

scholarly journals NOVICE DESIGNERS' USE OF PROTOTYPES AS COMMUNICATION TOOLS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 2277-2286
Author(s):  
Sandeep Krishnakumar ◽  
Carlye Lauff ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Catherine Berdanier ◽  
Jessica Menold
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Outcomes ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Communication Tools ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Critical Design ◽  
Undergraduate Engineering ◽  
Novice Designers ◽  
Future Work

AbstractPrototypes are critical design artifacts, and recent studies have established the ability of prototypes to facilitate communication. However, prior work suggests that novice designers often fail to perceive prototypes as effective communication tools, and struggle to rationalize design decisions made during prototyping tasks. To understand the interactions between communication and prototypes, design pitches from 40 undergraduate engineering design teams were collected and qualitatively analysed. Our findings suggest that students used prototypes to explain and persuade, aligning with prior studies of design practitioners. The results also suggest that students tend to use prototypes to justify design decisions and adverse outcomes. Future work will seek to understand novice designers’ use of prototypes as communication tools in further depth. Ultimately, this work will inform the creation of pedagogical strategies to provide students with the skills needed to effectively communicate design solutions and intent.

Computer-Aided Ethnography in Engineering Design

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Dixon ◽  
Ying Liu ◽  
Rossi Setchi
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Sensor Technology ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Design Data ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
Customer Analytics ◽  
Voice Of Customer ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Internet Of Things

Modern upsurges of innovative technologies and sciences such as the internet of things, machine learning, cheap sensor technology and cloud computing have yielded new opportunities in the area of engineering design. This paper examines the state of the art of the fuzzy front end of engineering design in capturing customer and market information through ethnography and associated techniques. The reviewed range of technologies involve multimedia capture of ethnography, data analytics, as well as traditional researcher led approaches. Intelligent ethnography is presented as an expansion to customer analytics in the offline field, to capitalise on these developments. As a result of this study, market and design teams will better understand how to capture the voice of customer, design data and market data to push for ever more relevant products and technologies. Finally, a new application named inferred engineering has been identified as a fuzzy front end evidence based ideation technique.

scholarly journals A FUZZY FRONT-END PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK FOR START-UPS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
Nuno Miguel Martins Pacheco ◽  
Anand Vazhapilli Sureshbabu ◽  
Masaru Charles Nürnberger ◽  
Laura Isabel Durán Noy ◽  
Markus Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Development Framework ◽  
Front End ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Extended Approach ◽  
Role Based ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
Start Ups

AbstractStart-ups tend to form with a central idea that differentiates them from their competitors in the market. It is crucial for them to efficiently transform the idea into a marketable product. Prototyping helps to iteratively achieve a minimum viable product and plays a crucial role by enabling teams to test their ideas with limited resources early on. However, the prototyping process may have wrong focus leading to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Previously, we proposed role-based prototyping for fuzzy front-end development in small teams. It supports (1) resource allocation, (2) the definition of responsibilities, and (3) structuring the development process with milestones. In recent research this was a promising yet incomplete approach. We extend the previous work by refining the prototyping process by adding a prototyping matrix with two dimensions (purpose and lens), a prototyping cycle (plan, execute, test, reflect, assimilate), and a modified Kanban board (Protoban) for planning, managing, and reflecting cycles. This process, named PETRA was tested with a start-up developing an autonomous trash picking robot. The extended approach supported the team significantly in providing a clear idea of what to do at what time.

scholarly journals Inovação aberta no processo de pesquisa e desenvolvimento: uma análise da cooperação entre empresas automotivas e universidades

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Vilas Boas Viveiros Lopes ◽  
André Ferrarese ◽  
Marly Monteiro de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
Flex Fuel

Resumo: A crescente demanda por inovação e a necessidade de reduzir o tempo e o custo do desenvolvimento de novos produtos têm mudado o cenário automotivo nacional, o qual foi por muito tempo caracterizado por um modelo fechado de inovação. A tecnologia flex fuel tem sido um desafio para as empresas desse setor e é o fator motivador deste estudo, cujo principal objetivo foi compreender o processo de inovação aberta no contexto de Fuzzy Front End, identificando as principais motivações e os principais gargalos para implementação. Para atingir esse objetivo foi realizado um estudo de caso longitudinal em um consórcio composto por 9 empresas e 2 universidades. A metodologia envolveu pesquisa qualitativa e quantitativa. A principal contribuição teórica desta pesquisa é justamente o pioneirismo no que diz respeito às empresas montadoras automotivas trabalhando de forma colaborativa. Esta pesquisa também tem implicações gerenciais importantes. Ela indica as peculiaridades que devem ser consideradas quando em um ambiente de coopetição, bem como sugere aos gestores de que forma trabalhar as fases iniciais da inovação. A pesquisa retrata bem o papel das universidades nesse contexto.

scholarly journals Framing and Tracing Human-Centered Design Teams’ Method Selection: An Examination of Decision-Making Strategies

2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivek Rao ◽  
Euiyoung Kim ◽  
Jieun Kwon ◽  
Alice M. Agogino ◽  
Kosa Goucher-Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Selection Strategy ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Human Centered Design ◽  
Project Outcomes ◽  
Method Selection ◽  
Class Average ◽  
Development Literature

Abstract Designers’ choices of methods are well known to shape project outcomes. However, questions remain about why design teams select particular methods and how teams’ decision-making strategies are influenced by project- and process-based factors. In this mixed-methods study, we analyze novice design teams’ decision-making strategies underlying 297 selections of human-centered design methods over the course of three semester-long project-based engineering design courses. We propose a framework grounded in 100+ factors sourced from new product development literature that classifies design teams’ method selection strategy as either Agent- (A), Outcome- (O), or Process- (P) driven, with eight further subclassifications. Coding method selections with this framework, we uncover three insights about design team method selection. First, we identify fewer outcomes-based selection strategies across all phases and innovation types. Second, we observe a shift in decision-making strategy from user-focused outcomes in earlier phases to product-based outcomes in later phases. Third, we observe that decision-making strategy produces a greater heterogeneity of method selections as compared to the class average as a whole or project type alone. These findings provide a deeper understanding of designers’ method selection behavior and have implications for effective management of design teams, development of automated design support tools to aid design teams, and curation of design method repositories.

scholarly journals Rethinking Virtual Teams for Streamlined Development

2008 ◽  
pp. 1646-1664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Larsson ◽  
Tobias Larsson ◽  
Nicklas Bylund ◽  
Ola Isaksson
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Virtual Teams ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End ◽  
Shared Culture ◽  
Shared Goals ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Risky Business

Much of the research on creative teams tends to focus mainly on relatively small teams working in the fuzzy front-end of product development. In this chapter, we bring a complementary perspective from an industry context where creativity is often perceived as risky business—yet a precondition for success. Here, we focus closely on people and teams that might not usually describe their own work to be of a primarily ‘creative’ nature, and that currently work under circumstances where traditional approaches for enhancing creativity might no longer be applicable. Drawing from experiences in automotive and aerospace development, we argue that it is time to radically progress our current understanding of how creativity could be introduced in organizations where factors like legal demands and contractual agreements severely restrict ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, and where well-known creativity enablers such as trust, shared goals, and shared culture are becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish.

Streamlining the Fuzzy Front‐end

1994 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 4-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Reinertsen
Keyword(s):  
Fuzzy Front End ◽  
Front End
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