Designing for Trust: Understanding the Role of Agent Gender and Location on User Perceptions of Trust in Home Automation

The potential of smart home devices for improving the comfort, energy efficiency, and security of its residents has been noted by researchers and early adopters of these technologies. Despite these advantages and advances in home automation technology, their adoption has not been as widespread as anticipated by experts. Existing research has shown that the lack of trust in home devices is a significant deterrent to widespread adoption. There is little data on how this perceived trustworthiness of the system might be impacted by the location that the device operates in, and the perceived gender of the automated agent within the device. Therefore, this exploratory study addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the role of agent location (office / home) and gender of the agent’s voice (female / male) on perceptions of trustworthiness in a controlled laboratory setting with a simulated smart lock system. Preliminary results following quantitative and qualitative analysis of this pilot study show that users trust stereotype-congruent automated agents (male voice in office, female voice in home) more than stereotype-incongruent automated agents. These results shed light on users’ perceptions of trust with home automation devices, and provide directions for future research and development of trustworthy home automation devices.

Object Reorientation and Creative Performance

Functional fixedness refers to a cognitive bias that prevents people from using objects in new ways, and more abstractly, perceiving problems in new ways. Supporting people in overcoming functional fixedness could improve creative problem solving and capacities for creative design. A study was conducted to detect whether a relationship exists between participants’ tendency to reorient objects presented as stimuli in an Alternative Uses Test and their creativity, also measured using the Wallach Kogan pattern meanings test. The Alternative Uses Test measures creativity as a function of identifying alternative uses for traditional objects. The Wallach Kogan pattern-meanings test detects the ability to see an abstract pattern as different possible objects or scenes. Also studied is whether Kruglanski’s Need for Closure scale, a psychological measure, can predict the ability to incorporate reorientation cues when identifying uses. This study revealed highly significant, high correlations between reorientation and several creativity measures, and a correlation between reorientation and the predictability subscale of the Need for Closure scale. A qualitative exploration of participants’ responses reveals further metrics that may be relevant to assessing creativity in the Alternative Uses Test.

Proposal of Delta Design Map Based on Function, Behavior, Structure and User Experience for Design Ideation Support

In the present competitive business environment, designers and engineers need to come up with creative, innovative and valuable design ideas. In engineering design, the function (F), behavior (B) and structure (S) of a product are discussed using design theory and methodology. On the other hand, the concept of user experience (UX) is becoming important in product design. In this paper, we first discuss the relationship among F, B, S, UX and the value of a product. Then we propose a delta design map as a framework for a systematic method and computational tool for design ideation support. A delta design map does not describe F, B, S and UX for design examples but describes their differences (delta) between design examples. This approach makes the descriptions efficient and gives clear criteria on what needs to be described and what need not be described. By preparing a delta design map, we can systematically and exhaustively analyze the potential similarity among all design examples from the viewpoint of F, B, S and UX and obtain triggers for ideation. The results of a simple trial of the proposed method are presented and discussed in this paper.

Design of Multi-Purpose Products: Guidelines From a User Perspective

Multipurpose products are the artifacts with more than one intended or realized purposes. Abundance of multipurpose products in the market raises interesting questions about the desired customer preferences that lead to success or failure of such products in the market. This study aims to set the premise for developing design guidelines for multipurpose products. The study described in this paper is a qualitative content analysis of reviews of multi-purpose products available from online vendors. A traditional content analysis method is followed, where each sentence from the reviews is coded and categorized by three reviewers. Each category is then carefully analyzed and any redundancies are resolved. Finally, an interrater agreement is achieved between the three coders. The obtained categories shed light on customer expectations from multi-purpose products, their concerns, comments and experiences and their advice from the customer’s viewpoint for the design of such products. Each category identified here shows a potential research direction and a foundation for developing new guidelines for the development of such products.

Flexibility and Real Options Analysis in Design for Long-Term Generation Expansion Planning of Power Grids

In recent years, the electricity industry has seen a drive towards the integration of renewable and environmentally friendly generation resources to power grids. These resources have highly variable availabilities. This work proposes a stochastic programming approach to optimize generation expansion planning (GEP) under generator supply capacity uncertainty. To better capture upside opportunities and reduce exposure to downside risks, flexibility is added to the GEP problem through real options on generator addition, which are to be exercised after uncertainty realizations. In addition, with the end goal of providing decision makers with easy-to-use guidelines, a conditional-go decision rule, akin to an if-then-else statement in programming, is proposed whereby the decision maker is provided with a threshold of excess total generator capacity from the previous time period, below which a predetermined generator addition plan (the option) is exercised. The proposed methodology and its decision rule are implemented in a real-world study of Midwest U.S. Comparisons are made to quantify the value of flexibility and to showcase the usefulness of the proposed approach.

A Comparison of Variety Metrics in Engineering Design

This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting methods for assessing the variety of a group of design ideas. Variety is an important attribute of design ideas, because it indicates the extent to which the solution space has been explored. There is a greater likelihood of successfully solving a design problem when a more diverse set of ideas is generated in the early stages of design. While there are three existing metrics for variety, it has not been established how well they correlate with each other, so it is unknown whether they provide similar assessments of variety. This uncertainty inspired our investigation of the three existing metrics and, eventually, the development of a new variety metric — all of which we compared statistically and qualitatively. In particular, 104 design ideas collected from 29 sophomore mechanical engineering students were analyzed using the existing and new variety metrics. We conducted correlation analyses to determine if the four metrics were related and to what degree. We also considered the qualitative differences among these metrics, along with where they might be used most effectively. We found varying levels of statistically significant correlations among the four metrics, indicating that they are dependent. Even so, each metric offers a unique perspective on variety and may be useful in different situations.

Origins of Design Principles: The Case of Nuclear Reactor Design Projects

Through a cross-sectional study of reactor design projects, this work explores the origins of design principles. The analysis of in-depth, open ended interviews with reactor designers reveals that there are design principles of which practitioners are aware (self-aware principles), and those principles recurring across projects which designers implicitly use in their work (naive principles). This analysis suggests that the ability of practitioners to generate principles is a function of the development of the domain of design and of its particular technologies. Larger the menu of prior designs, greater is the ability of practitioners to generate principles on which to base future work. In closing, and based on the analysis of interviews with reactor designers, I propose a set of criteria for use by design researchers developing design principles for practitioners.

Scenario-Based Conjoint Analysis: Measuring Preferences for User Experiences in Early Stage Design

Conjoint analysis has proven to be a useful method for decomposing and estimating consumer preference for each attribute of a product or service through evaluations of sets of different versions of the product with varying attribute levels. The predictive value of conjoint analysis is confounded, however, by increasing market uncertainties and changes in user expectations. We explore the use of scenario-based conjoint analysis in order to complement qualitative design research methods in the early stages of concept development. The proposed methodology focuses on quantitatively assessing user experiences rather than product features to create experience-driven products, especially in cases in which the technology is advancing beyond consumer familiarity. Rather than replace conventional conjoint analysis for feature selection near the end of the product development cycle, our method broadens the scope of conjoint analysis so that this powerful measurement technique can be applied in the early stage of design to complement qualitative research and drive strategic directions for developing product experiences. We illustrate on a new product development case study of a flexible wearable for parent-child communication and tracking as an example of scenario-based conjoint analysis implementation. The results, limitations, and findings are discussed in more depth followed by future research directions.

Measuring Information Content of Freehand Sketches Using a Cognitive Chunk Visualization Protocol

This paper first presents a protocol study and its software realization for visualizing cognitive chunks as they form in real time during freehand sketching of design concepts, and then illustrates a method and metrics for measuring the information content of freehand sketches based on those chunks. A manual protocol for detecting cognitive chunks during sketching was reported earlier. In this research, the said protocol was automated into a software program and validated in a new protocol study, using new participants. The chunks detected by the program, by definitions in cognitive science literature, serve as entities or units of information conceived at once by the designer. The relations between these entities, esp. spatial relations, are then computed using a new method, which represents the sketch as an entity-relation (ER) model. An established protocol for measuring information of ER models is then applied to compute the information content of the sketches.