RAPID prototyping, INFORMATION technology, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, and BUSINESS partnerships

To build a platform for (high, sustainable) use, we need to know what will thrill users. Finding the right concoction of technology, functionality and design to delight users takes a thousand decisions, pivots and changes. The JSTOR Labs team has been using Flash Builds -- high-intensity, short-burst, user-driven development efforts -- in order to prototype new ideas and get to a user saying "Wow" in as little as a week. In this paper, a distillation of a presentation I gave at NFAIS 2015, I will describe how we have done this, highlighting the partnerships, skills, tools and content that help us innovate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PROTOTYPES, INDUSTRIAL design, ENGINEERING design, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, and NEW product development

Prototyping can be seen as the heart of the innovation process. Typically, engineers and designers both work on prototyping activities, but their diverse backgrounds make for different perspectives on prototyping. Based on earlier literature, this study investigates commonalities and differences in the prototyping behavior of engineers and designers. For this study, semi‐structured interviews and workshops with different experiments were conducted. Using low‐fidelity prototypes, our results indicated that there are differences in the early phase of prototyping. Engineers focused on the features and functions of a prototype and needed to meet specific goals in order to push the process forward. Designers, on the other hand, used prototypes to investigate the design space for new possibilities, and were more open to a variety of prototyping materials and tools, especially for low‐fidelity prototypes. In the later prototyping phases, the prototyping behaviors of engineers and designers became similar. Our study contributes to the understanding of prototyping purposes, activities, and processes across disciplines, and supports the management of prototyping in new product development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, COMMAND of troops, MILITARY technology, and DISRUPTIVE technologies

The Department of Defense (DoD) has recently launched several initiatives to accelerate technological innovation and sustain the U.S. military's technological leadership in an environment of increasing global competition. These include six new or expanded programs to enhance the use of experimentation and prototyping under the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the military services. This study examines the six programs and compares their features in light of historical case studies of past disruptive military innovations and the success factors that enabled these innovations to progress from idea to prototype to fielded military capability. Best practices are identified that can be shared between the six programs, or implemented in the design of new DoD initiatives to promote and secure U.S. technological dominance on the battlefields of tomorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RAPID prototyping, TREND analysis in business, PROTOTYPES, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, MANUFACTURING processes, and THREE-dimensional printing

The rapid prototyping has been developed from the 1980s to produce models and prototypes until the technologies evolution today. Nowadays, these technologies have other names such as 3D printing or additive manufacturing, and so forth, but they all have the same origins from rapid prototyping. The design and manufacturing process stood the same until new requirements such as a better integration on production line, a largest series of manufacturing or the reduce weight of products due to heavy costs of machines and materials. The ability to produce complex geometries allows proposing of design and manufacturing solutions in the industrial field in order to be ever more effective. The additive manufacturing (AM) technology develops rapidly with news solutions and markets which sometimes need to demonstrate their reliability. The community needs to survey some evolutions such as the new exchange format, the faster 3D printing systems, the advanced numerical simulation or the emergence of new use. This review is addressed to persons who wish have a global view on the AM and improve their understanding. We propose to review the different AM technologies and the new trends to get a global overview through the engineering and manufacturing process. This article describes the engineering and manufacturing cycle with the 3D model management and the most recent technologies from the evolution of additive manufacturing. Finally, the use of AM resulted in new trends that are exposed below with the description of some new economic activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RAPID prototyping, WORLD Wide Web, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, VIRTUAL reality, and COMPUTER-generated imagery

Coming from the 2D and 3D games that everybody is very familiar with, these days the world has been taken by storm with the introduction of virtual reality technology. In this paper I covered the essence of this new empowering technology through things like: a short representative definition and classification, the hardware requirements for stepping into the VR world, and the most important aspect which is the applicability of this technology in the society that we live in. Also, the main purpose of this paper was to identify which VR game engine a beginner should be using for their first project. Through the research that has been done in this article, I come to the conclusion that the most suitable game engine in this case is Unity. To further prove my statement, I developed a small project that consists of a 3D VR maze which shows how easy it is to learn and develop using Unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

USER interfaces (Computer systems), HUMAN-computer interaction, SYSTEMS design, COMPUTER science, SYSTEMS development, and TECHNOLOGICAL innovations

The interfaces of computer systems embedded in certain types of consumer electronic products are frequently targets of criticism. Perhaps the most frequently cited examples of poor user interfaces are those associated with videocassette recorders. Two of the obvious consequences of poorly developed human-computer interfaces are first a considerable portion of the population is unable to benefit from the primary functionality of these products and second the loss of potential recording tape sales represented by the flashing clocks. Storyboard prototyping can be defined as a technique designed to generate consensus and closure via a tangible, interactive systems concept. Inspired by Scandinavian research into cooperative design, the thrust of the Cooperative Interactive Storyboarding Prototyping (CISP) approach is to more actively involve users in the prototype interface development. CISP empowers users with tools and techniques encouraging them to interactively contribute to real-time, storyboard use, evaluation and modification. Crucial here is the concept of the role of the user changing from reviewer to codeveloper.

MASS customization, SUSTAINABLE development, ECONOMIC competition, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, CONSUMERS, NEW product development, and VIRTUAL prototypes

The need for companies to improve their competitiveness may lead to innovation and the reconceptualization of traditional products and processes, with companies making an effort to enhance product elements related to functionality, attractiveness, technology and sustainability, and implementing mass-customisation concepts. Mass-customised products are developed to satisfy specific customer needs, in line with increasing demand for product variety and customisation. The analysis of what customers really want, capturing the Voice of the Customer (VOC), is one of the strategies used to establish effective product development processes. Using a VOC survey, it is possible to transform customer needs into the functional and psychological requirements of the product. This paper presents a methodology based on Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to support the capturing of the VOC in regard to the visual, haptic and auditory characteristics of products. This method can be applied to the beginning of the product development process, to allow companies to deduce from the data the requirements of new industrial customised products. A flexible and interactive Virtual Prototype (VP) of a product category is then developed as a product platform in a draft version by designers and configured according to customer needs, using an immersive VR environment. This method, based on the use of VP, reduces the number of physical prototypes that need to be manufactured during the product development process, thus reducing overall costs. In addition, the VP based method supports the mass-customisation process of products through the real-time integration and collection of data for product configuration preferences, involving as many users as possible representative of the target users of the new products. To demonstrate this process a case study concerning the development of the VP for a washing machine, a summary of test sessions with users and results are presented. Specifically, the results presented in this paper are related to improvements in capturing the VOC and reductions in Virtual Prototyping cost and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, RAPID prototyping, SYSTEMS engineering, and GUIDANCE systems (Flight)

A Real Options Valuation Model is developed to recommend how to valuate technology when benefits cannot be measured in monetary value. Expected values of effectiveness are used to select the preferred alternative. The methodology is illustrated using three guidance system technologies in the Army's Javelin program. The strategy created multiple real options that gave the Army the right (without the obligation) to select one guidance system technology based on the outcome of technology development tests. Results indicate the Army paid less than the total value of the options, but could have increased net savings by paying different amounts to test each alternative. The analysis method provides a logical and defendable approach to the analysis of alternatives under technology development uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PROTOTYPES, ECONOMIC competition, ORGANIZATIONAL performance, BUSINESS enterprises, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, RAILROAD passenger cars, HIGH pressure (Technology), and HYDROGEN as fuel

Abstract: The notion of dominant designs refers to dominance in the market, hence the literature on dominant designs ignores the selection process that already takes place in pre-market R&D stages of technological innovation. In this paper we address the question to what extent pre-market selection takes place within an industry and how this may lead to dominance of one design over others before the market comes into play. Furthermore we study what selection criteria apply in the absence of actual market criteria. We do so through a historical analysis of design paths for hydrogen passenger cars. We argue that prototypes are used by firms in their internal search process towards new designs and at the same time as means of communicating technological expectations to competitors and outsiders. In both senses, prototypes can be taken as indicators of design paths in the ongoing search process of an industry. We analyzed the designs of prototypes of hydrogen passenger cars from the 1970s till 2008. A database is compiled of 224 prototypes of hydrogen passenger cars, listing the car''s manufacturer, year of construction, hydrogen conversion technology, fuel cell type, and capacity of its hydrogen storage system. The analysis shows to what extent one design gained dominance and which strategies were adopted by the firms in their search processes. We conclude that indeed a dominant prototyping design has emerged: the fuel cell combined with high pressure gaseous storage. Actual and expected performance acted as selection criterion, but so did regulation and strategic behaviour of the firms. Especially imitation dynamics, with industry leaders and followers, is a major explanatory factor. Our main theoretical claim is that the selection of a dominant prototyping design is based on an interaction of sets of expectations about future performance of technological components and regulatory pressure that results in herding behaviour of the firms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

MOBILE communication systems, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, COMPUTER software development, MANAGEMENT, VIRTUAL prototypes, and INTEL microprocessors

Intel has driven innovation in computing over decades. Intel's goal is to bring the powerful x86 Intel® Architecture to virtually all computing devices. Rarely are those devices used in isolation. Instead, virtually everything that computes connects, be it wired or, increasingly, wireless. The proliferation of mobile devices puts a particular emphasis on cellular connectivity, bringing about an always-on, always-connected lifestyle. Those consumer-oriented devices are characterized by fast-paced innovation where more and more functionality is implemented in software. Fast-paced innovation is only possible if software and system verification can be done before the availability of silicon. In response to this challenge, development teams at Intel adopted virtual prototypes (VPs), which are simulation models of the entire system hardware and the verification environment. These VPs consist of transactionlevel models, which are far more abstract than RTL representations. The chosen level of abstraction must properly balance features to be modelled on the one hand and simulation speed on the other. Simulation speedups of more than two orders of magnitude as compared to RTL enable the simulation of complex use cases. This allows pre-silicon system concept validation and production software development. This article describes the infrastructure and methodology used for transaction-level modeling at Intel and outlines a number of success stories for integrated mobile platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RAPID prototyping, TECHNOLOGICAL innovations, ENVIRONMENTAL impact analysis, MANUFACTURING processes, THREE-dimensional printing, and BUILDING materials

Digital fabrication represents an innovative technology with the potential of expanding the boundaries of architecture. The potential to fabricate elements directly from design information is transforming many design and production disciplines. In particular, 3D printing has become the key of modern product development. As the use of additive manufacturing grows, research into large-scale processes is beginning to reveal potential applications in construction. The combined methods of computational design and robotic fabrication have the well-demonstrated potential to create formal and structural advances in architecture. However, their potential contribution to the improvement of sustainability in construction must be evaluated. In this study, we identified environmental guidelines to be considered during the design of digitally fabricated architecture. The key parameters were extracted from the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of three case studies. The environmental assessment performed indicated that the relative sustainability of the projects depended primarily on the building material production. Specifically, the impact of digital fabrication processes was negligible compared to the materials manufacturing process. Furthermore, the study highlighted the opportunities of integrating additional functions in structural elements with digital fabrication to reduce the overall environmental impact of these multi-functional elements. Finally, the analysis proved the potential of digital fabrication to reduce the amount of highly industrialized materials in a project, which are associated with high environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]