The lack of knowledgeable and skilled workers is a major challenge faced by the Malaysian furniture sector. It hinders industrial productivity and its ability to move up the value-chain by adopting high technology. Therefore, in order to assess the awareness and readiness of the Malaysian furniture industry for Industry 4.0, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted with a sample of 778 large-, medium-, and small-sized furniture manufacturers throughout Malaysia. This study is part of an on-going Erasmus+ program funded by the European Commission, initiated in 2018 to develop a university-level education program to train workers capable of handling Industry 4.0 technologies for the furniture and wood industry in Malaysia. The results revealed that manufacturers of wood-based panel and metal furniture were more prepared to adopt automation and Industry 4.0 technologies compared to solid-wood and leather furniture manufacturers. The benefits from Industry 4.0 technologies include increased production capacity, product diversity, cost competitiveness, and workforce reduction. Further, the results of this study suggest that the lack of knowledgeable and skilled workers to handle Industry 4.0 technology is a concern among furniture manufacturers, and possibly the proposed university-level Industry 4.0 program may be beneficial to train workers for the future of the industry.
This research was specifically developed for the preliminary study of verbal protocol analysis (VPA) for the recognition of design representation underlying a design activity phenomenally based on design research ethics. The ethics case study purposely aims to develop the pre-post observation on a rigorous prescriptive study of the think-aloud design experience according to the eco-design identity in the product form context. Eight pilot participants were sampled from the degree-level product design programme from the School of Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. In the preobservational study, the emphasis on design pattern via a reflective practice (RP) approach using the visual imagery interactions between interpolative and extrapolative strategies was utilised by design scheme method. Meanwhile in the post-observational analysis, rubrics for evaluation were used as a design tool assessment to evaluate the concept of eco-design artefact by using the quality of the morphological patterns. The rehearsal prescriptive analysis, also known as s VPA's preliminary study (VPAPS), was predicted to show the design representation (by contextual learning) with the interpretation of the eco-design identity. The outcome should present an encode of the designer's human cognition framed by the design phenomena's existence within an educational reliability test. By using dual method triangulation, a rigorous VPA method ethically achieved a future design criterion as the goal of design representation pertaining to real-fieldwork case study for design and engineering education.
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