A creative prototype illustrating the ambient user experience of an intelligent future factory

Abstract

Abstract. This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype 'A remote operator's day in a future control center in 2025' was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research, which was based on explicit ambient user experience goals in the nominated industrial work context. This article describes the complete creative prototyping process, starting from the initial user research that included evaluations of current work practices, technological trend studies and co-design workshops, and concluding with user research that assessed the final design outcome, the science fiction prototype. The main contribution of the article is on the ambient user experience goals, the creation process of the video-illustrated science fiction prototype, and on the reflection of how the experience-driven prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with expert process control workers. For the science fiction prototyping process, the contribution demonstrates how the method may employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented user experience research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used to validate the results.

Human-centred design in industry 4.0: case study review and opportunities for future research

“…Basically, one of the key measurements to understand the degree to which the design of HMI meets usage requirements is its usability, which focuses on functional indicators: usefulness, efficiency, effectiveness, and the learning curve of the user interface. The deeper concept of user multidimensional experience—which considers users’ emotional and psychological responses—is getting increasing attention and is also known as the core concept of user-centred design (UCD) (Chen, 2016 ; Kymäläinen et al, 2017 ; Lin, 2018 ; Paelke et al, 2015 ; Zheng et al, 2018 ). UCD, also interchangeably called user-centrality , embraces the user’s needs and involvement as the centre of the co-designing development process (Mazali, 2018 ; Wu et al, 2016 ) in order to enhance user acceptability and acceptance.…”

“…In addition to the acquisition of human needs and requirements, iterative design is also suitable for investigating “what-if” scenarios on design solutions. For instance, Kymäläinen et al ( 2017 ) and Harwood et al ( 2019 ) built fiction prototyping—video-illustrated and tangible interaction tools—to facilitate human-centred perception and cognition of the future potentials of products and/or services. This so-called design fiction—an interactive and tangible approach—evaluates alternative design solutions or criticizes existing ones (Knutz et al, 2014 ) before they are manufactured and/or delivered to customers, which enhances the robustness of iterative design by deeply understanding human experience.…”

“…In the last group of research interest, three studies present experience-driven approaches that visualize design scenarios (RR4) regarding future possibilities to exploit human experience. Based on design fiction, both Kymäläinen et al ( 2017 ) and Harwood et al ( 2019 ) demonstrated the usefulness of the video-illustrated prototype in avoiding the difficulty of interpreting abstract verbal descriptions of new design. This method enables designers to interactively envisage a spectrum of “what if” scenarios towards human experience that may then be explored by using the range of other design methods: focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires.…”

“…The phenomenon of Industry 4.0 reflects contemporary design contexts that frequently contain complex interdependencies of human and non-human actors—internet of thing (IoT) devices, digital and physical environments—shaping the framework of human roles and socio-technical systems (Cimini et al, 2020 ; Coulton & Lindley, 2019 ; Jwo et al, 2021 ; Kong et al, 2019 ; Kymäläinen et al, 2017 ). However, this does not mean that the existing concepts of design—for example, design for manufacturing and assembly (Favi et al, 2021 ), or a traditional design process that considers existing solutions to fulfil the needs of the largest group (Lorentzen & Hedvall, 2018 )—are redundant.…”

The Internet-of-Things: Reflections on the past, present and future from a user-centered and smart environment perspective

“…The first example is from the renowned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland where, under the guidance of Tiina Kymäläine, they have been using the methodology to explore how the Internet-of-Things, in combination with ambient intelligence, might be used to create factories of the future. Their work has not just advanced thinking on the possibilities for new technologies but has also moved forward the methodology by introducing a 'video-illustrated' variant of Science Fiction Prototyping [66]. The second example is rather more speculative in nature, addressing how the Internetof-Things might be impacted by Nano-computing (making fully autonomous computers, which include sensors and actuators, built to Nano-metre −10 −9dimensions).…”