Ubiquitous computing-based design tools and systems

Computer-Aided Design 59 (2015) 158–160

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Editorial

Ubiquitous computing-based design tools and systems Just before the turning of the millennium, a rather strong vision on the role and exploitation opportunities of ubiquitous technologies was developing. It was foreseen that the then emerging: (i) computing, (ii) sensing, (iii) communication, (iv) networking, (v) searching, and (vi) conversion technologies would lead to a situation where a large-scale mobility could be integrated with the pervasive computing functionality. An overview of the considered technologies, enablers and applications is shown in Fig. 1. The generic objectives of ubiquitous system developments have been circumscribed as: (i) focus of attention, (ii) context awareness, (iii) automated capture, (iv) simplicity of interaction, (v) implicit input, (vi) ad hoc connectivity, (vii) smart reasoning, and (viii) socialized operation. The achievement of these objectives has been facilitated by new applications enabling physical technologies (e.g. smart materials, direct energy transmitters) and enhanced software development technologies (e.g. componentsbased programming, multi-agent technologies, on-line document crawlers, and service-oriented architectures). Miniaturization of computing hardware technologies (processors, memories, sensors, actuators) and embedded control software technologies made it possible to equip artifacts with computer power and networking facilities, and to implement the concept of Internet of things. Ubiquitous technologies and systems were seen as forerunners of a new era, in which not only consumer durables and ambient systems feature various forms and levels of smartness and cooperative adaptability, but also design enabling tools, appliances and systems. They were conceived to be capable to autonomously communicate with human beings, existing products and embedding environments, and to proactively support design problem solving based on ‘emergent smartness’. These motivated many researchers to study the functional affordances of ubiquitous computing-based design tools and systems, and to investigate their possible applications and acceptance by designers and other stakeholders. Support functions such as: (i) collecting and recording sensorial information, (ii) elicitation of document and repository information, (iii) facilitation of on-site or remote operative research, (iv) data collection through prototyped or in-use products, (v) capturing and transforming context information, (vi) idea uttering and communication on the spot, (vii) gaining inspiration for product conceptualization, (viii) remote video communication with fellow designers and stakeholders, (xi) contents adaptation for heterogeneous portable devices, (x) nomadic access to computing and visualization services, (xi) ad hoc networking with arbitrary information appliances, (xii) situated learning on demand, and (xiii) information mining from verbal communication have been developed and tested by pioneering researchers. The emergence and initial rapid proliferation of ubiquitous computing technologies have raised the academic expectation towards a wide-spread propagation of ubiquitous design support in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2014.11.007 0010-4485/ © 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

all disciplines and application domains. At the same time, the industrial practice of computer aided design and engineering has remained less influenced than expected and the main users were insisted on their all-embracing, integrated, networked, collaborative systems. It seems that there was no real niche in the industrial practice left for ubiquitous computing-based tools, systems and methodologies, or just minor efforts have been made in this direction some two decades ago. But, what is the current situation? This was the major question that stimulated the initiation of this special issue. We intended not only to collect information about the new academic theories, tools and methods, but were also interested in the industrial solutions, applications, impacts, and experiences in product and service systems design. In total, there were less number of papers submitted than expected. It is not known whether this happened for technical reasons, or due to professional matters. It is fair to say that we did not receive papers on drastically novel theories or methodologies, exploration of unanticipated affordances, brake-through algorithms, pioneering prototypes, or sophisticated industrial applications. We also have to confess that compilation of this special issue has taken much longer time than was originally planned. Many of the papers submitted after the first announcement of the Call for papers have been dropped by the guest editors because they were not relevant for the planned special issue because of their focus or standard of reporting. Some papers have been rejected by reviewers. The situation was the same with the papers that were submitted after the second announcement of the Call for papers. In the end, six papers with reasonable relevance and novel proposals have been selected and included in this special issue. Needless to say, we are pleased to offer you this special issue after our long lasting editorial work. The first paper is a survey paper under the title ‘Ubiquitous computer aided design: A broken promise or a Sleeping Beauty?’ Contributed by Horváth, I. and Vroom, R.W., this paper meditates if ubiquitous technologies have failed to revolutionize computer aided design or the really new innovations and methodological changes are just still to come? The authors provide a historical overview from the establishment of the discipline of CAD (the period between the beginning of 1960s and the beginning of the 1970), through the periods of consolidation and functional articulation (1971–1981), integration and networking (1982–1995), and virtualization and collaboration (1996–2005), to the period of permeation into new application domains (2006–today). The paper explains that in the last two periods many technological developments such as virtual reality, knowledge ontology, cooperating agents, cloud technologies, and not only ubiquitous computing technologies had their effects on CAD. They assume that this, as well as the strong embedding of the traditional computer aided

Editorial / Computer-Aided Design 59 (2015) 158–160

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Fig. 1. The vision on the enabling technologies and applications of ubiquitous computing.

design methodologies and systems in the industrial design practice, may be a reason of why the influences of ubiquitous technologies could not be stronger and further reaching in the context of academic research and industrial applications. They point at the fact that there is a prevailing uncertainty concerning the expectable future impacts of ubiquitous computing, which has been very much challenged by cyber-physical computing, and will probably be even more challenged by biological and quantum computing. The second paper is a full-length research paper, submitted by Sivanathan, A., Lim, T., Ritchie, J., Sung, R., Kosmadoudi, Z. and Liu, Y. Entitled The application of ubiquitous multimodal synchronous

data capture in CAD, this paper focuses on capturing the affective states of engineers during design activities to further understand the product design process. A generic framework is proposed for ubiquitous unobtrusive data capture from the activities in CAD environments. A large set of data are monitored and logged, such as inputs, interactions, biophysical, chronological performance, and design solutions data, which are used as metadata for post design task analysis. One of the conclusions of the authors is that using metadata provides a new perspective on, and allows a new way of investigating CAD supported design activities. This may give the basis for improving designers’ creative work, but also for the enhancement of the functionality of CAD systems. Collected via

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Editorial / Computer-Aided Design 59 (2015) 158–160

miscellaneous devices and routed through various data paths, data samples are thus possessing disparate latencies and need to be synchronized. The proposed framework supports interconnecting devices running independently in isolated platforms by means of a communication interlink. It remains for future studies to see what effect the heterogeneous instrumentation has on the experience of designers and their creative work. The third paper, entitled Enhanced product lifecycle information management using ‘communicating materials’, by Kubler, S., De˙ addresses rigent, W., Främling, K., Thomas, A. and Rondeau, E., the issue of everywhere and anytime present product information collection and management. The assumption of the authors of this research paper was that a combined prospective and retrospective closed-loop lifecycle management provides better visibility and control for the product throughout its life cycle. Therefore, their research focused on the implementation of both downstream and upstream ubiquitous data collection facilities. They intended to achieve this objective by using a new kind of intelligent material capable of undergoing physical transformations without losing the data that is stored on it and its communication ability. In addition, they designed a framework that allows achieving a high level of data synchronization. The framework enables data updates on the product, regardless of the network availability. The role and functions of the intelligent material is demonstrated in the context of ‘communicating medical garments’. Based on this, the stakeholders (the authors call them actors) involved in the product lifecycle process can obtain new information and knowledge about the lifetime happenings concerning their products. Future research is needed to study the affordances of smart materials and data fusion issues in case of a multitude of products. The next paper, entitled Developing multiagent systems for design activity analysis, starts out from the assumption that engineering design is a complex socio-technical activity characterized by coevolution of problem and solution, and that the actual design theories are not well suited to represent this co-evolution and suffer from limitations in terms of modeling the complexity of design activity and its dynamics. The authors, Choulier, D., Fougères, A.-J. and Ostrosi, E., show that multiagent technologies can play an important role in developing theories and models for interactivity in socio-technical systems, such as ubiquitous design enablers. First, they address the theoretical underpinning of design activity reasoning. Then, they present a multiagent system, called Agents-based DEsign Activity Analysis (ADEA) system that capitalizes on this theory. ADEA includes both cognitive and reactive agents, and can provide advantages from three perspectives, namely, (i) from human perspective (by enabling communication, coordination and collaboration between users and agents), (ii) from design activity perspective (by coordinating the co-evolution of the problem and solution), and (iii) from a knowledge perspective (by handling the knowledge management activities of distributed systems). We believe that the principles presented by the authors can be used in the development of multiagent-based ubiquitous design enablers. The research paper submitted by Mejía-Gutiérrez, R., OsorioGómez, G., Ríos-Zapata, D. and Zuluaga-Holguín, D., entitled Ubiquitous conceptual design of an ubiquitous application: A textile SME case study for real time manufacturing monitoring, places the utilization of ubiquitous technologies into a different context. The authors developed an index to support the description of the ubiquity level of product and service systems considering: (i) user/context/system interaction, (ii) data transfer, and (iii) data processing activities. It is in fact generated by a fuzzy inference subsystem that converts linguistic inputs into a numerical value

for the ubiquity level index of a particular application. Other contributions of the paper are an activity process and progress monitoring framework, and a ubiquitous collaborative design support environment. The node of the system manages the task, and the face-to-face and remote interactions, but also the communication and the coordination of the design support tools, such as QFD, TRIZ, and PDS. Instead of a regular graphical user interface, a Ubicomp User Interface (UUI) is applied as the interface of the collaborative platform. The hardware element of this UUI is a large multi-touch screen. Since the objective of the authors was to apply the platform to support ubiquitous conceptual design of a specific application, they demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach in a case study related to the local textile industry, where it was used for keeping awareness of the productivity level, including the outcome of distributed design and the performance of the production workunits. The authors conclude that the proposed approach can be used to evaluate ubiquity levels, as well as a tool for concept selection and validation for ubiquitous products and services. As its title indicates, the lastly included application paper, entitled Editing 3D models on smart devices, intends to transfer some of the modeling functionality of CAD systems to portable devices. This paper is co-authored by Kang, Y., Kim, H., Suzuki, H. and Han, S. The starting assumption of the authors was that the widely used smart devices, which are now a part of our everyday life, can support new professional applications, such as education and robot industry. The technical limitations (e.g. screen size, computing capacity, and memory size) make the application of this kind of appliances challenging in sophisticated computing and visualization tasks. The authors also found that gesture-based input for smart devices is difficult. To compensate for the limitations of a gesture-based input mechanism, they proposed the so-called macro-parametrics approach and representation scheme, which support transferring of 3D models created on a smart device to a desktop computer-based CAD system in an editable form. Using the smart device environment allows reducing the time spent on model input, fastens product conceptualization, while also facilitates collaboration. The authors tested the prototyped ubiquitous front-end processor system in one application, which however could not provide an exhaustive validation of the proposed methodology and system. We hope that this compilation of new research and development results could demonstrate the power and application opportunities of ubiquitous design enabler tools and systems not only for fellow researchers, but also for industrial end users. We also hope that we could stimulate further thinking and perhaps more intense investigations into new theories, methods, and tools by casting light on some current research, development, and application issues. Unfortunately, there are no low hanging fruits out there concerning the development of really useful ubiquitous design enablers, in particular in the context of their integration with traditional CAD tools and systems. This is one of the reasons why we are so grateful to each of our authors for their contribution to this Special Issue. We do appreciate their efforts and nice collaboration. We are also indebted to our reviewers who helped us to achieve a high quality special issue.

Guest editors Regine W. Vroom Imre Horváth Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands