Concept Development Support with Virtual Prototyping Tuomo Tuikka HCI & Group Technology Research Laboratory Department of Information Processing Science University of Oulu Oulu, Finland e-mail:
[email protected] tel:+358-8-5531900 Developing small hand held electronic devices is a complex task requiring multidisciplinary cooperation between people such as industrial designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and marketing staff. Generally product development process can be divided into at least three distinct phases: concept development, product design and production. Characteristics for the concept development phase is that the product specification is fixed in a series of innovative discussions and meetings. The final specification should describe a product in a form that leaves no place for interpretations of what the product should do or what it should look like. This is difficult to achieve, however, because each of the groups involved is innovating and searching solutions simultaneously. Because of different initial perspectives and problems in communication between the groups all the determinants of the object of design work and its current situation may not be clear to all participants of the project. Correspondingly, the concepts each of the designers involved are using may conflict, a situation which the strive to move into concurrent engineering makes worse. Design work is always human — people do it. However, computer technologies can support this work in various ways. One potential support area is the use of virtual prototypes in concurrent engineering (Maxfield, Fernando et al. 1995; Pulli, Salmela et al. 1996; Pulli, Salmela et al. 1996). A virtual prototype is a three-dimensional graphical model of a device to be developed, with functionality added to it so that the prototype can be not only looked at but "used" — it simulates the functions of the future product faithfully enough for that. Depending on purpose the environments where virtual prototypes are used can be of varied complexity and realisticness, starting from a 3D model that can be manipulated on a workstation screen by using a mouse to one in an immersive virtual reality, manipulable with haptic interfaces for more realism. One of the central ideas behind the work of our research group is that a system based on a virtual prototype can be used effectively in reducing the communication problems between the different partners in a cooperative design. We are working with this theme in the VIRPI-project that is a part of a larger Finnish national program in increasing efficiency in product design. The aim of the VIRPI-project is to study the requirements and techniques of distributed virtual prototyping and find ways how such novel technologies could in the future be utilized efficiently in product development. The project is a joint effort between three product development companies interested in
hand-held devices and three research institutions: a group from VTT Electronics is developing a virtual prototyping environment, a group from the University of Industrial Arts is studying the industrial design process, and our laboratory is studying the possibilities to use virtual prototypes for communication in cooperative product design. Research shows that the early phase of product development is critical in many ways for company and the product (cf. (Ulrich and Eppinger 1995)), because the later any changes will be introduced, the more costly a product will be to produce. The critical points include timing, problem of validation, production costs, etc. problems which are present in the whole of the concept design work, discussions, design meetings, individual considerations and which culminate in the question what finally is the object of work, the sound and succesful concept to be the foundation of the subsequent design? We believe that by introducing virtual prototyping techniques to the concept development phase it is possible to support the cooperation of design participants so that they are aware of the current situation of design and also can communicate in a way which keeps them certain about the goal in a multiparticipant and interdisciplinary work environment. We have started our work by studying the product development in the three companies involved in the project. The research have been done by interviewing the key personnel of each product development team in order to get an overall view of product development work and issues these companies have to manage. Furthermore, due to the secrecy reasons of product development of our industrial partners we have established, videorecorded and studied a series of design meetings which gathered designers from different disciplines. The goal of those meetings was to design a concept of a pen phone, an accessory for a mobile telephone. Furthermore, this design was brought into a virtual prototyping environment developed at VTT Electronics with haptic interface and 3D glasses in order to illustrate how technologies were able to support a virtual prototype with real functionalities, i.e., the functionality of making a phonecall (Salmela and Pulli 1997). The aim of the field work, observation of the meetings, however, was to gather material for refining this virtual prototyping environment for distributed and interdisciplinary work of the concept development team. We are analyzing the material of these meetings in order to introduce appropriate requirements for virtual prototyping. These requirements will suggest, e.g., what are the functionalities that should be supported with the
virtual prototype. However, we do concentrate on the problem of cooperating actors and study the demands of feasible technologies in order to focus on industrial problems. In addition to field work and studying real design work by interviewing designers, our work will include also constructive research. This research will incrementally focus on the problems of distributed information systems and computer support of geographically and temporally distributed product development. Apparently cooperation of many companies with many different skills in networks is complex, requiring skilled coordination and determined project vision. Due to the needs of modern flexible production practice we have to take into consideration networking subcontractors and how to deliver proper information between different cooperating companies. Under these circumstances the needs are many depending on different perspectives. There are product developers and subcontractors who work with the customer information and infer probable product concepts, as well as designers who need to deliver visual information to support decision making of subscribers, or subcontracting engineers who need enough information in just-on-time basis in order to be able to manage project schedules and support their customers optimally. Inherent to all this activity of concurrent engineering is that they work under stress due to the market demand and severe competition. Although product development can be incremental and managing product families is crucial for cost benefit estimates, concept development includes high proportion of innovation. On the whole new innovation can be seen crucial for the future of the company. Therefore we aim to study the feasibility of computer supporting the whole chain of concept development, from market feedback to innovation and from product release to documentation and education. This is the cycle where virtual prototyping can be the most valuable asset for company, supporting innovation with valuable data, cooperation in concept development, marketing and finally education with if not full, but at least partially functioning prototypes in their use environment. Especially we argue that a virtual prototyping system can be useful for concurrent engineering teams by providing focused awareness of object of the work; which is the product, and goal of the work; which is the right and successful product as cost efficient release. All this requires a clear understanding of product development work and focused research on the problems found out from this work. Our interviews and videorecordings support this aim. The design meetings studied show the problems of communication even in a small group of professionals and in a rather clear problem setting. There is uncertainty not only of how does the product look like, but also what the product actually is. These kinds of problems, we think, arise from interdisciplinary group setting and difficulties to understand each other's vocabulary. Consequently, time is lost with uncertain objectives and misunderstandings which also lead to wasted work and efforts. Furthermore, extra work is needed in order to 'sort things out' and gain a
common understanding of what the group is really doing and what are the actions to be taken in order to achieve these goals. Naturally, structured approaches can alleviate this problem in certain extent, but they lose the benefits of real time information since individual professionals will inevitably work alone with their own tasks. Also we argue, that exact understanding of, e.g., a function to be implemented is lost if there is no visual feedback of how that part should work. Our aim is to introduce distributed virtual prototyping systems for different purposes, providing both mechanical animation and real functionalities, study the tools that will be provided for building virtual prototypes concurrently and to evaluate the solutions incrementally with techniques called future workshops. Also, in order to be certain of the relevance of our analysis and design process we will consult our partners and study design meetings where the objective is to produce a mechanical design to the pen phone. Naturally we must be aware of the other work done in CAD applications area and Virtual Reality community and relate our work to web development, e.g., (Bentley, Busbach et al. 1996), developments in concurrent engineering, e.g., (Fruchter, Reiner et al. 1995; Schulman 1995), virtual reality techniques, e.g., (Maxfield, Fernando et al. 1995) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) community, (ECSCW 1995) and developments in product data management (PDM) (Miller 1996). Our department has been working in cooperation with one of our industrial partners in commercialization of a software product that supports Internet marketing. However, on the whole our constructive work will combine available WWW services with our own facilities to provide easy access to common workspace, but also all the benefits of restricted access. REFERENCES Bentley, R., U. Busbach, et al. (1996). The Architecture of the BSCW Shared Workspace System. ERCIM workshop, Sankt Augustin, Germany, ECSCW (1995). Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work. Stockholm, Sweden, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fruchter, R., K. A. Reiner, et al. (1995). Collaborative Mechatronic System Design. Concurrent Engineering: A Global Perspective CE '95, McLean, Virginia, Concurrent Technologies Corporation. Maxfield, J., T. Fernando, et al. (1995). A Distributed Virtual Environment for Concurrent Engineering. Virtual Reality — Annual International Symposium '95, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press. Miller, E. (1996). “Web Technology Comes to PDM.” Computer-Aided Engineering Magazine (May): Pulli, P., M. Salmela, et al. (1996). Virtual prototyping based development and marketing of future consumer electronic products. IFIP World Conference on IT Tools, Canberra, Australia, Chapman&Hall. Pulli, P., M. Salmela, et al. (1996). All-digital virtual prototyping of future telecom products - concurrent engineering and marketing. CALS Europe '96, 7th International Conference and Exhibition on Electronic Commerce and Enterprise Integration in Europe, Paris, France, World Computer Graphics Foundation. Salmela, M. and P. Pulli (1997). A Virtual Prototyping System for Electronics and Telecommunication Product Development. Virtual Reality World Wide '97, Santa Clara, CA, USA, Schulman, M. A. (1995). Collaborative Communication in 3D. Concurrent Engineering: A Global Perspective CE '95, McLean, Virginia, USA, Concurrent Technologies Corporation.
Ulrich, K. T. and S. D. Eppinger (1995). Product Design and Development. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
