An increasing number of manufacturing companies have initiated designing and implementing AI systems in manufacturing, however, with limited success. Within our overarching research objective of establishing a methodology for the development of AI systems in manufacturing with socio-technical system consideration, this paper focuses on the early design phase of the development life cycle and aims to identify factors that are essential in the phase but whose importance has been less addressed in the manufacturing literature. To this aim, a case study was conducted adopting a design science approach. The case company was developing an ML-based anomaly detection system for a casting process. The researcher organised an AI system design workshop where participants from the company used the Human-AI design guidelines created by a leading large software company. The workshop enabled the participants to explore a wide range of design concerns. It, however, caused the confusing experience that they had to deal with too many questions simultaneously without clear guidance. Analysing this negative experience has led to identifying four design issues requiring further attention in the research. An example of these issues is that the interdependency of design decisions on operational procedures, human-machine interfaces, ML models, pre-processing, and input data makes it challenging to design these elements in isolation. The study found that a structured approach to dealing with the identified issues was currently lacking. This paper contributes to the manufacturing research community by addressing key unresolved issues in the research through highlighting practical details of designing AI systems in manufacturing. 

This paper presents a collaborative solution developed to enable people without prior Internet of Things (IoT) knowledge to ideate, conceptualise, role-play and prototype potential improvements to their work processes and environments. The solution, called the Karakuri IoT toolkit and method, was tested in two workshops with eight production leaders at a Swedish manufacturing company. Outcomes were analysed from the perspectives of materials interaction and instruments of inquiry. Results indicate the solution can help people conceive and prototype improvement ideas at early design stages. 

Futures Literacy is the capability to imagine and understand potential futures to prepare ourselves to act and innovate in the present. This pilot study aims to understand how artistic methodologies and speculative design can support the collaborative exploration of futures in the context of work and contribute to developing peoples' capability of futures literacy. Our premise is that technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of things can augment people and support their needs at work. To illustrate this process, we have presented a collaborative method that integrates an artistic intervention with speculative design activities. We tested the method in a full-day workshop with seventeen (17) participants from a Swedish academy responsible for enabling learning and competence development at work in the healthcare sector. The results indicate that the artistic intervention, combined with the speculative design activities, can challenge current participants' perspectives and offer them new ways of seeing futures with technologies. These new ways of seeing reveal underlying premises crucial in developing the capability of futures literacy. © The Author(s)

Artificial Intelligence offers a wide variety of capabilities that can potentially address people's needs and desires in their specific contexts. This pilot study presents a collaborative method using a deck of AI cards tested with 58 production, AI, and information science students, and experts from an accessible media agency. The results suggest that, with the support of the method and AI cards, participants can ideate and reach conceptual AI solutions. Such conceptualisations can contribute to a more inclusive integration of AI solutions in society.

This case study presents how the mixing of speculative design with artistic methodology can contribute to the inquiry oftechnological potentialities in the future of work. The goal and belief are that technologies such as artificial intelligence canaugment employee creativity and support their well-being at work. The co-design process followed an artistic approach andconsisted of three cycles of labs, workshops and events during the span of one year to support professionals with nontechnicalbackground in the ideation and conceptualization of possible futures. The artistic approach consisted of differentexploration perspectives of technology through the use of embodiment, artifacts and creation of speculative fictions. Theresearch team that facilitated the labs was interdisciplinary and the participants were assembled from different partnerorganizations from industry and public sector. We share the learnings from this study attending to three different perspectives:our learnings from the facilitation of the artistic approach, our learnings from the future of work ideas and concepts developedby participants, and discussion of what these learnings can mean to design practitioners and the research community. Resultsindicate that embodiment and speculative fiction can create engagement among professionals that lack technical expertiseand support them in collaborative exploration of alternative futures of work with novel and abstract technologies such as AI.

Novel IoT market solutions and research promise IoT modules that do not require  programming or electrical setup, yet shop floor personnel need to face problem solving  activities to create technical solutions. This paper introduces the Karakuri card deck and  presents a case study composed of four workshop sessions in four manufacturing settings,  where shop floor personnel tested the cards as a means of ideating and presenting  conceptual IoT solutions in the form of diagrams. The results indicate the validity of the  proposed conceptual solutions and suggest prototyping as a next step.

This paper describes an explorative design study conducted in the scope of a collaborative research project in the district heating domain. In the scope of the project, we have arranged extensive field studies at two power plants to understand the workflows, problems, and needs of industrial operators. We relied on the gained knowledge to design and develop novel visual interfaces that would communicate the overall status of the district heating system at-a-glance. We aimed at exploring potential directions and alternatives beyond conventional industrial interfaces. One particular aspect of our research was related to how the physicality of the underlying industrial processes can be expressed by purely visual means. The paper introduces three high-fidelity prototypes demonstrating the novel visualizations developed. The paper explains the design choices made, namely the relation between the selected visual encodings to the requirements of the industrial operators' tasks. Preliminary evaluation indicates industrial operators' interest in the designed solutions. Future work will incorporate an extensive qualitative evaluation on site.

Although scholars and practitioners are actively discussing the potential benefits of introducing Internet of Thing (IoT) in production, IoT is still as an expensive solution in terms of investment and high technological threshold. Manufacturing companies seek a simpler and lower-cost approach to adopting IoT technologies in production, allowing companies to take advantage of the knowledge and innovation capabilities of people close to shop floor operations. This paper introduces the concept of “Karakuri IoT” – simple and low-cost IoT-aided improvements driven by the people close to shop floor operations. A pre-study is conducted to examine the feasibility of the concept. This paper presents the results of the pre-study.

Within industrial control rooms the trend has been to move away from physical towards digital interfaces. However, operators working in these control rooms have expressed feeling a loss of connection to the production process and machinery they are controlling. As such we present two prototypes Haptic Mouse and Shift Report Tool which were used to explore the re-introduction of physical user interfaces into industrial control rooms.

This paper presents two case studies that suggest how to adapt Scrum for user-centered design (UCD) focused industrial projects and how to work with UCD in Scrum software development teams. The objective of the paper is to share insights gained from running such combined projects in industry in order to help others avoid some of the pitfalls associated with this way of working. There has been much published in this area within the research community. However, our work presents both perspectives: adapting a UCD way of working towards a Scrum way of working; and adapting Scrum for running projects from a UCD perspective. We explore the impact Scrum had on team members’ work-practices during a project life-cycle and what lessons were learned from our experiences.