Effortless capture of design output a prerequisite for building a design repository with quantified design output

Abstract

This exploration aims to understand people, interactions, decisions and learnings of development projects. According to [6], the output of most design activity is twofold; one part being information (explicit knowledge), and the other being experience (tacit knowledge). The output might be formalized in terms of text, numbers or simulation data, or crude, reflective prototypes used within the team [7, 8], which we summarize as 'artifacts'. Aiming to understand both design activity and output in product development, we are focusing on projects doing design of physical and mechatronic prototypes, with the research goal of observation and quantification of said design activity. Focus is placed on capturing tangible artifacts created as output from design activity, with the future aim to create a repository (Fig. 1) for storing the design output (artifacts from real industry examples) for future re-use. There are two main reasons for capturing the output from development projects; the first for researching the output, aiming to quantify prototyping tools and methods. The second is to help the designers during (by supporting documentation)

Capturing Prototype Progress in Digital Fabrication Education

“…Furthermore, in order to use such a system for capturing prototyping in design in a manufacturing context, additional functionality should be targeted, for example, a robust and informative database of the captures. Protobooth Oulu, which is based on a system developed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Norway (Sjöman et al, 2017), explicitly targets documentation in educational environments. It facilitates the documentation process, making it more reflective.…”

“…The Protobooth system presented by Sjöman et al (2017) helps the researcher obtain more data on projects. It is used for capturing physical prototypes from ongoing early-stage product development projects with the aim of giving researchers access to 'information and knowledge from early-stage PD'.…”

“…Its digital repository currently consists of data from various prototyping projects. The physical instrument presented in Sjöman et al (2017) has two cameras that are used for capturing multiview images of prototypes and metadata (i.e. information on who, when, and where the prototype was captured, essentially linking pictures with users through the use of radio frequency identification cards ( RFID)).…”

“…The link between the activity and the artefact is a core concept (and assumption) of that paper. In a later system presented by Kohtala et al (2018), better cameras and a turntable were added for experimenting with 3D scanning and generating 3D models. Additionally, that system had a microcontroller logger and could also produce laser-cut pieces from sketches in order to identify causalities in the early stages of PD.…”

“…The design activity of a processional character progresses incrementally; it is a continuous process where past steps shape future steps. Therefore, owing to such nature of design, and as can be seen in Sjöman et al (2017), UCD needs interactive applications that can be evaluated with end users, where circular design is employed by designers to create new creative applications and materials. In this paper, we attempt to document physical artefacts (i.e.…”