ICED 21 Workshop : Decision-making & Interaction Data : How to efficiently integrate sensors and data in the early stages of product development ?

According to the latest Design Society reports (Isaksson and Eckert, 2020), forecasting the future of product development in 2040, the products of the future will involve even greater connectivity. In this context, Data-Driven Design (DDD) is emerging. DDD is a design technique based on collecting and exploiting data as a decision-making tool for the optimization of the design process.

However, as presented in the last SIG Decision Making workshop at DESIGN 2020 (Briard et al., 2021), companies don’t have sufficient tools and resources to integrate DDD in their product development phases. They tend to emphasise on easy and low-cost solutions, like text mining on social media or online review. Thinking ahead the collection and use of data in the different design phases should lead to innovations or, at least, product improvements.

Thus, the research question addressed in this workshop was: What decision-making tools could designers use during the early stages of product development to efficiently integrate sensors and data?

An attempt has been made to provide answers through the different creativity sessions held during the workshop.

In the first part of the workshop entitled “Context”: the workshop outlines were presented, the participants then presented themselves and the Decision-Making SIG was introduced. The workshop themes and objectives were highlighted. Then, a state-of-the-art about DDD in Product Development and its challenges was presented. Next, the second part of the workshop took place. The rules for a good creativity were reminded and the participants then addressed a series of 4 different creativity sessions. They directly wrote their answers on virtual post-it notes and pined them on an online idea board. They were sometimes asked to explain and share their answers with the other participants.

The workshop was held online on Microsoft Teams Application and the online interactive idea board was on Klaxoon website. About 23 participants were connected to the workshop session.

Despite the world situation that forces us to stay home and communicate virtually, interesting ideas and discussions have taken place. The workshop main outcome was a first draft of tools for sensors data integration in product development. Several answers seemed promising for future research. Their further investigation and development may help design science to move forward.

 

Isaksson, O., Eckert, C., 2020. Product Development 2040. The Design Society. https://doi.org/10.35199/report.pd2040

Briard, T., Jean, C., Aoussat, A., Véron, P., Le Cardinal, J., & Wartzack, S., 2021. DATA-DRIVEN DESIGN CHALLENGES IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS. Proceedings of the Design Society, 1, 851-860. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.85