This study explores the characteristics of collaboration between people with Japanese value orientation in co-design workshops. We define co-design as an approach where designers collaborate with non-designers to design new products or services. This research investigates the effect of culture and value orientation on co-design between designers and non-designers in a Japanese context. Through interviews with four professional designers, we identified that the participation of Japanese non-designers in a co-design workshop might be hindered by the presence of an expert, who is perceived as a person in a higher social position. With 20 subjects, we experimentally investigated the impact of power distance on collaboration. European and Japanese groups of non-designers generated and discussed ideas in two conditions-with or without a professional designer in the group. Through behaviour and speech analysis, we assessed the quality of collaboration within the group. Depending on their power distance score, the contributions of participants were affected differently by the presence of a professional designer. Unlike in the European groups, the presence of a designer in a Japanese group created a hierarchical structure that hindered the participation of non-designers. This work is expected to support the development of co-design methods adapted to their cultural contexts.
Co-design approaches invite users in the early phases of design process for designing new products or services, which helps collecting users' Kansei data. As users are not formally trained as designer, tools and techniques have been proposed to help users to be creative in co-design. However, hierarchical structure in design teams has negative impacts on quality of collaboration in co-design. In this paper, as a step for employing co-design approach to collect users' Kansei values, we developed new tools for idea generation and selection. Anonymity was expected to help the participants to freely express their thought. The tools were assessed in a lab-based experiment with sixteen Japanese subjects. Findings show that anonymity leads to higher both objective and perceived creativity in idea generation and increases critical discussion and participants' perceived performance in idea selection. These findings have the potential to be used in developing tools for design practice.
This study proposes and verifies bipolar electrostatic grippers stacking 3D-printed-layered modules consisting of arrays of elastically deformable bipolar beams. The influence of the mechanical compliance of grippers on the attractive force that it generates is clarified by comparing two types of modules having either high or low mechanical compliances. Experiments measured the attractive force of the gripper and demonstrated the pick-and-place performance of a thin film. The results show that mechanical compliance plays an important role in mitigating the attractive force decrease in stacking modules. The grippers’ ability for thin film handling is demonstrated by observing pick-and-place behaviours of the proposed bipolar electrostatic grippers.
This study aims at developing a new user research method that uses IoT sensors embedded at users' homes to enable users to recall their memories. The proposed method was evaluated by experiments where four participants individually created user journey maps with quantity data that was collected for seven days. The results showed that IoT sensor data increased the quantity, clarity, and accuracy of recalled memories. This study argues that IoT sensors can be an effective approach to increasing user research quality by triggering users' memories without interfering with users' ordinary lives.
This research investigated the difference between novice and professional designers in terms of skills of gaining insights into design process. This study experimentally examined the designers' behaviours in gaining insight by comparing how novice and professional designers empathise differently toward users. In the experiment, designers were asked to create a concept map and gain insights from a prepared userinterview transcript. The participants were interviewed about how they gained insights of users from the transcript. The concept map and insight statements were analysed. As a result, we clarified a difference between novice and professional designers which were generalisation of the transcript and inclusion of suppositions into insight statements. This study is a first step to analyse and support the insight generation of novice designers.
This technical paper demonstrates the influence of the probe-tip surface smoothness of a bipolar electrostatic chuck (ESC) on electrostatic force. ESC, which has a silicon-based beam-array microstructure, aims to pick and place a dielectric object with a curved surface owing to the compliance of its elastically deformable beams. The ESC was fabricated using a lithography technique, specifically deep reactive ion etching (DRIE), to smooth the surface of the beam tip. The surface roughness of the beam tips was observed using a field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM), and the adhesional force was experimentally evaluated. The results show that by the smoothing process, the adhesional force per unit area is significantly increased compared to the previous study reported by Choi (one of the authors). This suggests that the proposed bipolar ESC device has great potential for use in various industries.
This study aims to investigate the good way to generate insight through empathy with users. The fifteen experiment participants drew thinking processes of understanding users and defining insight statements while generating insight statements based on a given interview transcript. The thinking processes were assessed by qualitative coding, and the insight statements were evaluated. The results identified the types of thinking that should be avoided when gaining insights. This paper proposes a framework to categorise designers’ process of gaining insight.
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