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| 2. |
- Bergström, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Assessment of team based innovation in a Product Service System development process
- 2011
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Ingår i: Research into Design. - Bangalore, India : Research Publishing Services. - 9789810877217 ; , s. 711-718
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Innovation is often measured based on how the product performs on the market. This makes it difficult to measure the performance of a team since the time to develop a product may take several years. In this paper we show the importance of creating a common ground and facilitation in a team, two aspects that is not easy measure, but should be assessed. We also discuss innovation on three interrelated organizational levels, the operational, which is the development team and in focus in this paper, the managerial and the strategic level. We found that companies need indicators to measure and/or assess performance on all three levels and thatmore research is needed to find the inter-links between the levels to prescribe measures and assessment points.
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| 3. |
- Bergström, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Educating engineering designers for a multidisciplinary future
- 2007
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Contemporary companies on a global market are experiencing constantly changing business demands and increased competition. Increasing focus in product development is now put on issues like understanding users and their needs, the context where users’ activities take place and creating sustainable solutions (McAloone, et.al., 2007). In manufacturing companies, engineering designers play a significant role in realising what is captured in these words.Future engineering designers will hold wider responsibilities for such tasks (McAloone, et.al., 2007; Larsson, et.al., 2005), thus challenging current engineering design education. Educating engineering designers today significantly differs from traditional engineering education (McAloone, et.al., 2007). However, a broader view of design activities gains little attention. The project course Product/Service-Systems, which is coupled to the lecture based course Product life and Environmental issues at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and the master programme in Product Development at the Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden, are both curriculums with a broader view than traditional (mechanical) engineering design. Based on these two representatives of a Scandinavian approach, the purpose in this presentation is to describe two ways of educating engineering designers to enable them to develop these broader competencies of socio-technical aspects of engineering design. Product Development at LTU A process, called Participatory Product Innovation (P2I) underpins the master programme Product Development and originates from the Design for Wellbeing (DfW) framework (Larsson, et.al., 2005). This is an inclusive framework which seeks to bring together business, human issues and technology in a comprehensive approach to support the creation of tomorrow’s innovations. A main principle is that many different disciplines should contribute to spur innovation by collaboration across disciplines (Larsson, et.al., 2007). The P2I process starting position is in Needfinding (Patnaik and Becker, 1999), were the students conduct observations and interviews to gain access to ualities in the users’ context. An identified challenge here is to keep people in view and not jump into conclusions, i.e., to understand a situation perceived by its actors as problematic and to widen the design space. Product/Service-Systems at DTU Besides the teaching of traditional engineering skills, the curriculum for the project course aims to build up multidisciplinary competences such as understanding the socio technical aspects of product design and synthesis of products and delivery systems. The students are assigned to redesign an existing physical product, such as a washing machine, and turn it into a product/service-system. The main objective for the project is that the resulting solution should have a substantially lower environmental impact whilst maintaining a similar functional performance as the initial product. The student teams are first guided through an analysis of the initial product’s product life cycle, yielding insights into four aspects of product design:1. indentification of current environmental impacts, 2. life phase systems the product encounters, 3. activities that involve the human actor (i.e. customer) and the product, 4. actor-network that support and supply these activities throughout the product’s life. Based on the analysis, goals are set for the improved solution and concepts are developed for a new product/service-system. This way the students are lead through engineering and socio-technical analysis tasks and thereby laying the foundation for their synthesis work in the concept development phase of the project. Concluding Remark By emphasising socio technical aspects in a process model or in a project course, the students are more likely to consider users, their context and sustainable solutions. This we see as essential competencies in product/service-system design and functional product development. References Larsson, A., Larsson, T., Leifer, L., Van der Loos, M., Feland, J. (2005), Design for Wellbeing: Innovations for People, In proceedings of 15th International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED 05, August 15-18, Melbourne, Australia.McAloone, T.C., Andreasen, M.M., Boelskifte, P. (2007), A Scandinavian Model of Innovative Product Development, In Proccedings of the 17th CIRP Design Conference, Springer-Verlag, Berlin. Patnaik, D., Becker, R. (1999), Needfinding: The Why and How of Uncovering People’s Needs, Design Management Journal, 10 (2), 37-43.
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| 5. |
- Bergström, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Examining creative collaboration in distributed and co-located design teams
- 2007
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Ingår i: Design for society. - Paris : Design Research Society.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Product development, including all its phases, is today performed to a greater extent in globally dispersed teams. This paper compares two creative design sessions early in the product development process, one co-located session and one distributed session. The workflow in the co-located session was fluid and natural, whereas in the distributed session, it was sometimes disturbed by limitations ofthe mediating technology. The major deficiencies of the technology are the limited support for shared drawing surfaces, for shared control of these surfaces and for creation of concepts. In the co-located session embodied representation were used to describe, communicate and build upon concepts. Due to the limitations of the technology, these types of communication were seldom used in the distributedsession.
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| 7. |
- Bergström, Mattias
(författare)
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Getting physical : tangibles in a distributed virtual environment
- 2006
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The design of products is an increasingly complex task, where companies do not have and do not want the in-house competence to manage the development of entire products. Consequently, companies outsource parts of product development projects to other companies or join in partnerships. There is also an industrial shift of focus towards offering a total offer, i.e. selling functions instead of products. The function provider will have the responsibility of the physical artefact throughout the lifecycle and also have the capacity to continually improve the customer value through innovations. Hence, the provider will be able to reengineer, reuse and recycle the physical artefact. This puts new demands on the product development process, in which the total offer is not being offered by a single company because there is simply too much risk in such a commitment. To supply a total offer companies must collaborate closer than before, by exchanging among other things, intellectual properties in new temporary organizations (i.e. extended enterprise), permitting each partner to thus focus on their core competence. The total offer commitment promotes intense collaboration. Partners in the extended enterprise will most likely be geographically dispersed; therefore, tools and methods for distributed collaborative work are becoming increasingly important. Physical artefacts still play a predominant role in the product development process, even though virtual prototyping is used in everyday operations. The tangibility of physical artefacts makes them easy to use in design discourse (e.g. in design reviews, prototype evaluation). When performing design in distributed teams, a need to share physical objects will inevitably occur. This thesis presents the development of a new solution for distributed collaborative work that focuses on physical objects instead of person to person video conferencing. The author studied a design team at a leading industrial company in Sweden that used mock-ups as an integral part of their design process. Insights of their interaction with physical artefacts provided the requirements for a new type of collaborative tool for distributed work. The presented system allows remote collaborators a first- person view of physical artefacts or environments, e.g. mock-ups. This licentiate thesis also presents how the design process changed with the introduction of the new tool, i.e. remote engineers can share their "virtual" CAD data simultaneously with the technician situated at the prototype, who shares his "physical" data with the engineers. The new tools also provided unexpected support for co-located meetings, enabling users to look behind panels and view items that were normally hidden from their sight.
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| 8. |
- Bergström, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Needs as a basis for design rationale
- 2008
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Ingår i: Design 2008. - Zagreb : University of Zagreb. - 9789536313891 ; , s. 281-288
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study is based on data from a Swedish real-life industrial product development project for e-health care of elderly. The purpose in the paper is to discuss identification of user needs. Information about the elderly is transferred in recurrent meetings. Besides the perception that these meetings occupy time which could be spent giving care, the nurses find it problematic to convey such information to substitutes, as well as they have to rely on their memory. In this case, a Dictaphone device was a solution. Reports on practical activities of identifying user needs and how they affect decisions in product development are limited; one contribution of this paper is insights into such a case
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| 9. |
- Bergström, Mattias
(författare)
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Probing for innovation : how small design teams collaborate
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ongoing globalization is placing greater demands on industry. One strategy to stay competitive is to move from supplying only hardware to supplying total offers, e.g. thrust on wings or power by the hour. The total offer is a combination of a product and service, a product service system. This approach to the product development process focuses on the function of the offered system, i.e. functional product development. The function provider retains the ownership and responsibility of the function carrier, i.e. the hardware. This makes for greater risk, but also greater revenue. To deal with this new reality companies are collaborating to supply these types of total offer. Another aspect of retaining ownership of the function carrier is that through continuous innovations, companies can improve the product over the life cycle of the offer. In an industrial context, and often in a global setting, designing is primarily performed through collaboration in teams, e.g. a group of people possessing distinct competences respectively contributing to the task. Hence, with the deployment of a functional product development strategy, the team is given the challenge to collaborate as a global team, i.e. the individuals of the team are spread over a number of companies, sites and countries. Yet another challenge is to increase the innovation in the team. Consequently, with these diverse teams the ability to express thoughts, ideas and different point of views is important for team-based design. The team must not only solve a design task, but also understand and define the task. This kind of design is by default ill-defined and thus referred to as a ‘wicked problem’. However, it is in these wicked design tasks that new and breakthrough products are most likely to be found. But to reach the goal of innovation, the team must allow and embrace ambiguity, as well as act in a supportive environment. The purpose in this thesis is to illustrate activities in design teams when confronted with wicked design tasks. The focus is on how the team explores and communicates problems. The thesis also addresses how physical spaces affect the creative process. Insight into these issues will deepen the understanding of the design processes and enable development of new tools, models and methods, and thus improve the performance of team-based innovation. The cases are studied primarily through observations of small engineering design teams engaged in distributed and co-located collaborative work in early development. The research indicates that designers experience difficulties in communicating notions, such as ideas or thoughts, by solely relying on the usual approach of using sketches, writings and mere utterances. In team-based innovation, designers tend to use their own body, forming embodied representations, to fill in the blanks. Designers embody the future product, e.g. by envisioning themselves as the proposed product, or putting themselves in the users’ position to interact with a future product or both. Hence, the embodied representation becomes a form of prototyping. The designer occasionally incorporates an everyday object to add another dimension to this kind of prototyping activity. Normally, in the manufacturing industry, prototypes are refined and in a state of pre-production. Thus, they limit ambiguity and do not lend themselves to prompt designers to add new ideas. To support the team’s communication of ideas, the prototyping process has to allow the designers to explore the problem, change and propose new ideas, and aid their communicative and collaborative efforts. From the studies, a model derived for an iterative prototyping process in the early design phases is proposed. The model has its starting point in probing, which allows both the problem and the solution to be explored. Probing can incorporate a question, an idea, a concept, or an embodied representation. The design team acknowledges and interprets the probe, creating a shared or contrasted understanding. Still, it is in the differentiated and contrasted understanding that team members find the inspiration to ideate and create additional probing activities that provide for innovations. By looping this process numerous times, the understanding becomes shared and the product concept becomes more refined. However, the main value of the prototyping process is not the prototype per se, but rather the value in the process as such, since it allows the team to reflect in practice and experience through prototyping. The activities of a design team may be supported or hampered by the environment where the activities occur. A room and furniture, specifically designed to prompt a collaborative and creative mode, are suggested and demonstrated in this thesis. Insight from observing design activities in these creative environments provides a basis for further research.
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| 10. |
- Bergström, Mattias, et al.
(författare)
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Prototyping – a way to think together
- 2009
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Ingår i: Research into Design. - Singapore : Research Publishing Services. - 9789810822774 ; , s. 450-457
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The descriptive study presented in this paper is based on the empirical data generated by observing a global student design team. Their prototyping process are described and discussed to feed input to the facilitation of team based innovation. The emerging of a shared design vision as early as possible is vital for the subsequent design activities, in particular for innovation projects. Every day items, body language and simple rough prototypes are used by the student team to communicate their ideas, to generate feedback on the ideas and to put forward new ideas. The study indicates that the process of doing rough prototypes enables designers to make their implicit understandings visible in such cases when the development starts from scratch, e.g., innovations. Thus, prototyping, i.e., the use of rough prototypes and body language etc, assist designers to collaborate and share experiences in early phases when no agreed upon design vision exists.
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