ENABLING A SERVICE DESIGN PERSPECTIVE ON SHIP DESIGN
E Gernez, DNV GL, Norway K Nordby and B Sevaldson, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway
SUMMARY
Ship design is a collaborative exercise that involves many participants from numerous disciplines, who are expected to manage a demanding set of requirements with a broad range of possible design outcomes. It is then usually a challenge to connect several highly specialised experts, each bringing their own perspective and tools, into a collective exploration of the design space. The success of ship design projects directly depends on the coordination of, and the cooperation between, the participants. In this paper, we propose a user-centered perspective for ship design: which actors are involved throughout the entire process, in what environments do they meet and work together, what type of information do they exchange, what tools are they using to exchange this information, and what value is created through these exchanges? Existing practices in ship design are reviewed, based on literature and interview surveys, and new user- centered processes and tools are proposed and discussed.
1. INTRODUCTION
This research draws on experience from participation in ship design projects as a consultant for DNV GL Maritime Advisory. This included assistance in shaping the initial ship design outline, developing a strategy to select a shipyard, concept design, ship design optimisation, retrofit of existing design and support of optimal operation. Other participants in these projects included an approval engineer from the classification society, a new build manager and ship designer from the ship-owning company and shipyards, an independent ship designer, engineers in hydrodynamics, structure, systems and machinery, a model basin technician, a technology supplier and navigating crew. The ship types considered are all commercial vessels, ranging from standard off-the-shelf designs to custom designs.
A recent collaboration with the School of Architecture and Design (AHO) triggered the initiation of a 3-year PhD research project to examine ship design processes and tools in depth. The research drew upon AHO expertise in user-centered design (UCD), as applied to the Maritime Oil and Gas industry [1-3]. In this paper, we present the preliminary work conducted so far, and outline further research needs.
Firstly, a service design perspective on ship design is introduced, and this is used to review and comment on existing ship design practices (processes and tools). New processes and tools are then proposed and discussed, before we draw our conclusions.
2. A SERVICE DESIGN PERSPECTIVE ON SHIP DESIGN
2.1 PRESENTATION
Emerging from UCD, service design is a relatively young design discipline, although it is already in use in many service-based industries [4]. The primary goal of service design is improve the experience of the actors of a given
service, defining actors as all the participants involved in the making, offering and receiving of the service. In this context, ship design is viewed as a service offered to someone who needs a ship (e.g. a ship owner, who, in turn, is capable of offering a transport service with their ship), and in which the actors are all the participants in a ship design project; in a wide perspective, this also includes building, operation and decommissioning. The experience of the service users is defined as how enjoyable, rewarding, satisfying, time and cost-effective, satisfactory at upholding certain quality standards, etc., the ship design process has been, depending on the considered actor.
To the authors knowledge, this is the first time the principles of service design have been applied to ship design. The main principles are briefly outlined below, and have been freely adapted from the service design method as taught at AHO [5].
2.1 (a) Actors
As mentioned in the introduction, the actors involved in a ship design process are numerous and diverse. Each actor usually has their own agenda, resources and limitations. All together, they form a complex network, for which it is necessary to identify the drivers in terms of information creation, decision-making and economic power, to enable the process to go forward. The addition of a layer of multi-cultural exchange (e.g. when a Russian captain is commanding a ship flagged in Panama with a crew from the Philippines, a Norwegian owner and a South Korean designer and builder) makes the exchanges in the network even more complex. The goal of service design is to make these exchanges a great experience for each one of the actors.
Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects 2.1 (b) Touch-points
Touch-points are all the meeting points between the actors throughout the ship design process. For example, a meeting at the ship owners office with the new build manager and a representative of a shipyard will make for several touch-points: the room where the meeting is taking place and the design specification outline as an outcome of the meeting. Touch-points are a possible source of intervention for the service designer to improve the experience of the actors. For example, the touch- point meeting room can be equipped with technology that facilitates the visualisation of the current fleet of the ship owner, and the expression of their design requirements for a new ship project, and the touch-point design specification outline can be a template pre- prepared for a specific type of ship, with a list of equipment and desired functions; a kind of menu to order. Section 4.2 provides further details regarding key touch-points in a ship design process, as well as propositions for the design, to improve the user experience.
2.1 (c) Timeline, information flows, value creation
A timeline is a convenient way of showing the successive steps in the design process, enabling the actors involved at different steps to have a clear view of what they are expected to contribute to the overall process. It is also a convenient way of displaying touch-points, as well as flows of information and value creation. A simple example is shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Simplified timeline showing actors, information flow and value creation. (This figure is reproduced in larger format at the end of the article.)
2.2 RATIONALE
There has been no discussion around the fact that ship design is becoming an ever more complex discipline, involving increasingly numerous and diverse actors, highly advanced tools, time constraints and market fluctuations. Our argument is that this increasing complexity is experienced first-hand by the ship design actors, and, as such, they must be re-placed at the centre of the process, so that their specific needs can be catered for. The experience of the Norwegian ship designer and builder Ulstein, who specialises in offshore vessels (a particularly complex segment of ships) illustrates this need very well [6]:
Over the years, it has become clearer () that handling these challenges of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity are more of a managerial mastery task rather than a classic naval architecture and marine engineering based ship design task. It seems as if traditional naval architecture and marine engineering disciplines do not suffice as the basis for further enhancing such tasks. Next generation ship design models and approaches should, therefore, include also the necessary management tools, social science and support mechanisms to handle the extended system based ship design process.() Thus we argue that the existing and more traditional ship design approaches are particularly weak when it comes to handling and cater for a multi-dimensional and multi- disciplinary complex ship design approach.
Service design is proposed here as an inspirational method to cater for these necessary management tools, social science and support mechanisms traditionally missing in published ship design practices, as described in the same paper, by reviewing 29 different ship design processes described in [7]. The extended system based ship design process is defined as a process that accounts for both upstream (the ship as a revenue-making asset) and downstream (the ship as an operational tool, operated by human operators) dimensions of the design process, by including all the actors involved in the ship design process, from the finance investor considering ships as liquid assets, to the ship owner, responsible for a large fleet with a terribly complex and challenging set of international regulations and fluctuating freight rates, to the crew who must find a certain degree of ergonomics in operating the ship.
Figure 2 below illustrates the difference of this approach with published ship design processes: - actors are an integral, central part of the problem to solve - different steps of the process will involve different actors, each one bringing their expertise, tools and data - the service designers mission is to provide an overview for all the participants in the process, and to document the exchange of data and value creation between the actors, by focusing on the actors meeting points or touch-points.
Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects Figure 2: A service design perspective of ship design. (This figure is reproduced in larger format at the end of the article.)
3. EXISTING PROCESSES AND TOOLS FOR SHIP DESIGN
3.1 PROCESSES
Here, process refers to the communication of ship design processes in the literature. The proceedings of the 2009 International Marine Design Conference [7] concluded with the observation that many ship design models have been invented, because of the open- endedness of design, that is, every ship design process is different in its imperatives and constraints, and may therefore require a different process each time. This provides another argument for using a simpler approach, based on a timeline with the main ship-design steps, and using this to guide the actors involved in the process. As shown in Figure 1, a simple timeline would consist of six steps, including both the upstream (business-case development) and downstream (ship-building, operation and decommissioning) steps that must inform the main design activity (the design of the ship itself).
These six steps are detailed below, and are linked to existing practices, presenting the primary criticisms found in the literature:
1. The need for a ship: at this stage, the ship does not yet have a reason to exist; the decision to initiate a ship design process is purely a business decision, strongly influenced by the current and forecasted market situations. Building up a good business case is crucial at this point, yet very few published processes have begun with this step, as shown in [6]. 2. Defining the ship design specifications: most published processes have begun at this stage. The most common method is perhaps the requirement elucidation, formalised by Andrews [8] in the practice of designing warships. It demands to be jointly undertaken by the requirements owner and the preliminary ship designer, in order to balance what the customer wants and needs versus what the customer can afford. Per Olaf Brett from Ulstein added that the expectations of all stakeholders must be accounted for, pointing out that the needs of the customer are frequently not exactly the same as the customers customer (e.g. a cargo owner) [9]. Research by DeNucci on Knowledge Capture[10] with the development of a visual interface as a support for dialogue between the stakeholders would prove useful in this step; however, it is not known how widespread is this interface in the industry. In Section 4.1 we propose a low-tech tool that may also support this dialogue. Concept development and exploration, as described by van Bruinessen et al. [11], is a way of exploring the ships design space at an early stage. However, this exploration is based on a fixed system of components and requirements, hence preventing the find of alternative or unknown designs. 3. Designing the ship: the historical design spiral method [12] is both the most commonly used, and the most commonly criticised method. The main criticism is that it is a good model for the detailed engineering phase, after the design choices are made: this model easily locks the naval architect to his first assumption and he will patch and repair this first and only design concept rather than generate alternatives[13]. System engineering is more recent and has gained traction in the industry. The main criticism (from the same previously cited author) is that by cutting the design problem into blocks (systems, sub-systems, sub-sub systems, etc) innovative solutions can only happen inside, and not in between, the blocks, which severely limits the chances of obtaining an innovative design overall [13]. This illustrates that it is crucial to include what occurs at the interfaces between different actors and different steps in the design process, and that supporting the dialogue between different experts from different disciplines is a need that must be covered by the design process to bring local innovative solutions up to the overall design solution. Formal design optimisation, facilitated by an increase in computing capacity, is attempting to address this problem in a horizontal, or holistic, way. A multi-objective optimisation problem is defined, and it is supposed that the solution satisfies a wide set of transverse requirements [14]. However, the usability threshold for this method is very high (both in terms of hardware and software), and it can only provide solutions to requirements that can be mathematically formalised. Soft aspects of design, such as the confidence of the owner that the ship will satisfy their requirements are difficult to integrate in this process. Experience at DNV GL in facilitating design processes shows that the selected ship design is most frequently not necessarily the design with the best scores, but rather the design that all the actors like best. 4. Building the ship: at this stage, the main design is specified in a comprehensive design specification, but a great deal of detailed design remains to be done. The quality of the detailed design and the quality of the execution of this design in terms of, for example, steel workmanship is absolutely crucial to the quality of the delivered ship. Accompanying the design Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects in its transformation from a purely analogue/digital form (drawings and 3D models) into a physical form (steel structure) should also be part of the designers job. This is known as design for construction and has been documented in Bertram [15] and Lamb [16], for example, with a particular focus on what hull shapes can actually be built, and at what cost. Experience at DNV GL shows that the same design specification can produce 10 ships with very different performances in terms of fuel efficiency, and research is ongoing to provide support to shipyard, class and owners in identifying areas of attention for construction, as well as construction tolerances [17]. For example, number, position and thickness of weldings in the bow area, positioning of the bilge keel, orientation of the bow thruster grids, anodes, rudder alignment, etc. The implementation of such added precautions again must cater for the resources and limitations of each actor involved in the process: how to communicate the effect of local turbulences generated by a weld that is 5mm too thick to a steel welder who has no background in hydrodynamics? How to communicate the need to grind down this weld to the steel welders manager, who is focused on keeping the project on schedule? 5. Ship in operation: most published methods agree that the ship should be designed for a specific operation, and that data from past or future operations are fundamental in the process. This is especially true of formal design optimisation methods, where the ships operating profile is a constraint on the optimisation problem [14]. It would be interesting to see how many designers follow their design in operation, to assess whether they perform according to specifications, and include this information in their next design. This requires having good systems in place (both procedures and technology) to measure the performance of the ship in operation, and competence in data-mining to extract meaningful data from the large quantities produced, day after day of operation. Closing the loop from operation back to design is highly challenging; for example, it would require obtaining the insight of the navigating crew, which is not a common practice in ship design. 6. Decommissioning: this step has not yet been studied. There are most likely many possible improvements to be made to the individual experiences of the actors involved in this process.
3.2 COMPUTER-AIDED SHIP DESIGN Computer-aided ship design (CASD) is the major tool used in ship design. It is powerful in accelerating the design process by optimising the execution and coordination of successive engineering tasks, and assembling them into an automated decision-making process. As such, it is not a tool that is very well suited to a design space exploration, and early movers and adopters of CASD are realising that caution is still due against blind dependence on calculated data (). We must continue to seek the proper balance between man and machine [18], and that CASD should include new developments that both foster insight and creativity, rather than just provide faster and more detailed numeric analysis[19]. As a result, CASD developers are attempting to allow for multidisciplinary design space exploration with an improved user experience [20]: CD-Adapcos Starccm+ version 8.06 includes a Simulation Assistant, which is an interactive user interface that allows users to reproduce best practices and deploy them across the whole organization, ensuring repeatability of processes and enforcing consistency of results. Dassaults Solidworks 2014 has been developed to allow its users to transfer their creative ideas from design sketches and images into 3D models faster than before, while expanding the set of design tools that allow them to spread out into other markets.
The tools usability, that is, the capacity of the user to take advantage of a given tool for a given task, is the decisive factor, whereas the initial ambition of CASD is to aid the designer. In a previously cited paper [6], Tore Ulstein and Per Olaf Brett asked: Do design software tools make a difference? It is also interesting to notice that with now a continual introduction of different supporting ship design analysis tools, suites of complimentary software and related applications over a 30 year period, this development has led to an even greater fragmentation and partition of the ship design process. So many complex interfaces of these software tools have been generated without necessarily bringing more true understanding to the subject of effective ship design and new building execution. It might seem that for every new software system being brought to the work desks of the designers, he or she is up against an almost incomprehensible challenge to keep track, control and see the interactive influences the various good intended analysis tools produce, individually, and as integrated back to back calculating machines. () Experience at Ulstein indicates that problems of incompatibility and an over-complex situation in overseeing the consequences and implications of setting the constraints and boundary conditions of imperfect input and output data might have overshadowed the gains. () [It] has so far perhaps added more uncertainty and complexity to the task at hand, than it has improved the situation. [We did see benefits] but here the complexity and lack of human capacity and capability to handle all the variables and Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects their influences within a meaningful context for everyday decision-making is perhaps not as could be hoped for.
3.4 SIMULATION AND VISUALISATION TOOLS
Simulation tools are moving towards the early phase of the design process, and, as such, provide a great way to rapid-prototype how well a ship can perform a given mission (the most basic of these being to reach a given speed using a given power output). However, such tools are only used by the happy few because of their cost (both hardware and software) and their complexity. The capacity to rapid-prototype a ship for a given mission enables the designer to quickly explore the design space, by changing the ships mission; this is common practice in formal design optimisation, where constraints are changed or softened to push the boundaries of the design space exploration. Blind exploration of the design space would be too time-consuming and counter- productive (generating non valid designs), so research into using the insight and knowledge of experienced designers with regard to the design optimisation loop has been initiated [21]. After only a few iterations of the optimisation loop (which would typically produce several hundred different valid designs), the designer is asked to select the designs that seem most interesting, and the optimisation is refined in that direction. The bottleneck in this process is the interaction between the designer and the optimisation system: how to clearly present say 100 different designs that usually have only small differences between them? What information should be made available to the designer at that stage? Is the same information made available from one designer to another? Here again, the perspective of the user is fundamental. In Section 4.4 we present several ideas to begin addressing these questions.
4. SKETCHING FUTURE PROCESSES AND TOOLS FOR SHIP DESIGN
After 50 years of experience with CASD, Nowacki urged both the designers and the CASD developers to regard ship design as a learning experience and the design system as a learning tool, highlighting the need to improve feedback of intermediate and final results and apply simulation and visualization to illustrate cause of design effects[18]. In the sections below, we make several proposals in this direction.
4.1 EXPLORING ACTORS INTERACTIONS ON A TIMELINE
At the very early phases of design (steps 1 and 2 described in section 3.1), also called the fuzzy front end, the actors must address numerous uncertainties in terms of how the different pieces of the design puzzle interact with each other. For example, which shipyard to approach, and how to approach it? Should design consultants be involved in the process, with the hope of landing a better design, but with an immediate added cost to the process? To explore these interactions, we propose a type of strategy board game, in which the most important actors and design steps are modelled, the goal being to visualise different strategies, and include different actors and their implications in the process. Figure 3 shows a mock-up of how this board game could look, as used on a white board, which is a common feature in most meeting rooms where such decisions are usually made (touch-point). It could also be used on a table, like a traditional board game played among friends. This tool has the advantage of being very easy to use (no technology required), it is portable, modular and interactive, and it is easily integrated with the simple spreadsheets commonly used by ship designers in early assessments of the merits (for instance cost-benefit) of different design decisions.
Figure 3: mock-up of a strategy board game with the goal of exploring fundamental questions early in the design process: where are we now, who is involved, how can we work together, what happens next and how does this link to the other steps? (This figure is reproduced in larger format at the end of the article.)
4.2 DESIGNING FOR TOUCH-POINTS: GENERAL ARRANGEMENT DRAWING
As explained in section 2.1.b, touch-points are where actors meet (physically or not) to make decisions. Future research will assess which touch-points are most common in design processes, and how to design for these, so that they can facilitate decision-making. During the interviews carried out for this preliminary research, one interviewee remarked that when talking about design, at some point a ship drawing has to be put on the table to have a constructive discussion [22]. Therefore, one proposition we are making is to use a General Arrangement (GA) drawing as a touch-point, because, by nature, a GA drawing reflects the general arrangement of a ship, which significantly impacts overall characteristics, but research into and use of modern computer methods in developing and exploring general arrangements in preliminary ship design has lagged behind other fields such as hydrodynamics[23]. In this sense, a GA drawing is a map of a territory, displaying fundamental information on the basic elements of the Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects ship (hull shape, machinery and steering, bridge systems, cargo holds layout) that experts from different disciplines can use to explain their respective roles, and assess how they can interact together; this is why the proposed strategy board game in Figure 3 resembles a GA drawing. In addition, a GA drawing provides traceability information: the date of the drawing, its author, who approved it and when. Finally, it is again a low-tech solution (2D paper drawing) very commonly used by designers, and all the other actors throughout the entire life of the ship. One could think of using a GA drawing as a template for communicating the advancement of the design, by superimposing the different iterations of the design on top of each other, with the ability to go back and forth in time, so that the full design process can be documented (e.g. in a time-lapse fashion), and design variations can be ordered in branches when it comes to making a decision to depart from a standard design to use a more customised design, which is a highly strategic question both for the future owner of the ship and the designer [21, 24]. Finally, research exists describing the reconstruction of a 3D model from 2D drawings, using the STEP protocol [25], which allows a transition to the detailed design phase.
4.3 A GENERIC SHIP MODEL
Is there a simple ship model that can contain all the information necessary to describe the status of a ship, from a very abstract object (step 1: Need for a ship?) to a very complex, operational object (steps 4-5: building and operation) formed of up to a million pieces [26], ending up as an inert steel structure with hazardous material (step 6: Decommissioning)?
Parametric ship models are now commonly used, in design optimisation, for example [14], to encapsulate mostly geometric and structural information, such as the 3D shape of a hull (the position of each individual surface point) into a few parameters (from individual points to characteristic lines, to defining surfaces). Product Lifecycle Models (PLM) are more comprehensive, adding information regarding systems on board, and, most importantly, adding the dimension of time, enabling concurrent engineering at any step of the process [27]. However, the use of PLM models requires a very complex software infrastructure, and is primarily used for navy applications (design of warships); only a few shipyards are using them. Something simpler, with a radically different architecture, is needed. As a vision, we propose an architecture similar to Google Earth, where the fundamental layer is a 3D shape (a globe) on top of which any type of information (pictures, videos, sounds, user comments, measured or predicted data [28]) can be layered by geo-referencing. In addition to space, the dimension of time can be added in the new Google Earth Engine. In our vision, we see the ship as the fundamental 3D-shaped layer, with the possibility of geo-referencing different hull-shape variations or cargo hold arrangements at the design stage, and including observations from, for example, hull inspection surveys during the operation stage. The ambition is to develop a layer-by-layer increment in the functionality and uses of such a generic ship model, again inspired by how Google Earth and Google Maps have evolved throughout the years, in order to control the development costs and ensure that this tool has the functionality and interactivity required by the users.
4.4 A DESIGN SIMULATOR
Finally, we conclude this section on sketching future tools for ship design with the (grand!) vision of a design simulator. This vision has emerged from the research of UCD designers from AHO, who are involved in re- designing the bridge of an offshore supply vessel [1, 29]. As UCD designers must design in context, that is, conduct their design research in the environment for which they are designing, as much as possible [30], a number of field trips to offshore supply vessels have been carried out (totalling 2000 hours of immersion in offshore vessel bridges), and many hours have also been spent in bridge simulators. The UCD designers then built a mock-up of a ship bridge in their lab, to allow direct testing of their ideas (a new type of information display, haptic and vocal control; three patents pending), in context, and very quickly reach a proof-of-concept. The lab is shown in Figure 4, below.
Figure 4: design research lab at AHO bridge mock-up
Using this research approach in problematic ship design, the vision is to build on the Generic Ship Model and enable the visualisation of real-time design changes, with regard to the overall performance and feel of the ship. A first step in this direction has been made at AHO, with the development of the simulated scenarios facilitation method, which uses game engines as a real-time, interactive, realistic display to support the discussion between different specialists [2]. The user basically constructs a scene with the elements required to fuel a discussion between experts, and then folds this scene out into different scenarios that can be reconfigured very quickly, or instantly, by, for example, just changing the Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects position of the virtual camera. For example a simulated scenario was the event of a collision in the fjord of Oslo, and the different participants played out the characters of a helicopter pilot going to the rescue, the captains of the colliding ships and even a passenger of the sinking cruise ship, who had to swim to reach a life-raft. See Figures 5 and 6, below. This enabled the Norwegian Coastal Authorities to test and review their contingency and Search and Rescue plans, and to identify a number of problems, as well as design on the spot procedures to mitigate these problems.
Figure 5: Simulated emergency scenario in the fjord of Oslo view from the passenger who had to jump into the water to reach a life raft. [2]
Figure 6: same as above, but the perspective is changed to that of the helicopter co-pilot.
In this case, the ship itself is not modified, but rather its mission, so that the ship and its entire environment (crew, passengers, coastal authorities, other ships in the traffic lane) can be tested. The next step will be to create an immersive environment, the Design simulator, for the ship designer and all the experts from the different disciplines to facilitate a discussion on design issues that require their interaction, and speed-up the decision- making.
5. DISCUSSION
There are three main areas for further research, outlined below.
5.1 DESIGNING FOR EXISTING PROCESSES AND TOOLS
Although interactive and immersion technologies are becoming affordable and ubiquitous, development of new tools takes time and is costly. Analysis of existing processes and the current use of existing tools using a service design perspective can lead to the development of new methods or processes with low-technology, by focusing on facilitating a smoother interaction between the various actors involved in the different steps of the design process. Identification of areas of intervention can be achieved with another design methodology that has been developed at AHO, called Systems Oriented Design where the goal is 1. To describe an existing situation in its full complexity (how is a specific type of ship designed?) 2. To zoom into the areas where little is known, or where most problems are identified 3. To isolate this area, or areas, and redefine a bounded, sub- problem [3]. In a way, this is similar to a system engineering approach, with the difference being that the solutions to the sub-problem do not necessarily need to be fixed with a technological solution, and the identified problem may not be purely technical, but rather a management or communication problem, as evoked in Section 2.2, and with initial proposals in Sections 4.1 and 4.2.
5.2 DESIGNING FOR FUTURE PROCESSES AND TOOLS
At the same time, we believe it is extremely important to keep up with technological developments, in order to fuel the creation of new ideas. Relevant technologies include: -Cloud or Sky computing, enabling access to large sets of data and performing computation tasks from any location[31]. -Advanced simulation with multi-physics simulation, blending structural, hydrodynamic, thermodynamic and even economic/financial analysis. For example, DNV GL has developed a machinery simulator that can simulate the operation (including CAPEX and OPEX for different maintenance strategies) of most common systems on board a ship (Engine, Turbocharger, all types of pumps and compressors) in real-time[32]. -Real-time, realistic visualisation, with game engines to be soon incorporated into CASD systems to mimic the workflow of video games or digital movies: design, rendering, testing, redesign (and prototyping with 3D printers) are conducted in the same interface, with no time interruption and full control over the level of details of the designed object [33]. -Multi modular interfaces, which mix gesture and vocal control with haptic feedback, and can all be connected to the cloud, to fully engage the designer in its environment: Oculus rift, Microsoft Kinect, Leap and many more.
5.3 ENABLING A SERVICE DESIGN PERSPECTIVE
What can this new perspective enable, and how do we get there? We must repeat that technology alone will not Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects change anything if it is not developed for specific uses, with a high degree of usability. Technology uptake is particularly slow in the maritime business for many reasons [26], one being the lack of concrete, tailor-made, cost-effective applications of new technology, which occurs when user needs are not properly understood. What we seek are technology-enhanced processes, which put the user in the centre of the process, and use technology to assist the user in communicating needs, as schematically shown in Figure 7, below.
Figure 7: the user is at the centre of the process, and technology helps different users work together. (This figure is reproduced in larger format at the end of the article.)
Such design-driven innovation is now financially supported in Norway (jointly by the Norwegian Research and Design councils), and we believe it can enable the service design perspective of ship design outlined in this paper by facilitating the rapid prototyping of new services and products supporting the ship design process of the future: an inclusive, holistic, user-centered process, which focuses on people first, and technology second.
6. CONCLUSION
Our main argument is, in short, that the vision of the future of shipping or the ship of the future will not happen without first examining the design process of the future. UCD should play a fundamental role in this direction, and is now featured in the official agenda of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as a strategic method of developing future tools for the maritime industry, such as E-navigation [34]. UCD is also used in the offshore oil and gas industry, as a main innovation driver for integrated operations management.
Therefore, when Tor Svensen, CEO of DNV GL Maritime, shares his vision of the future of shipping with the maritime industry [35] and urges that industry to learn to think about their business and operation in new ways, when he acknowledges the impact that the convergence of real time data transmission, high computing capacity, mathematical modelling capabilities, remote control, sensors and miniaturization will have on the shape of the industry and when he urges the maritime industry to draw lessons from the offshore industry and to increase early testing capacity, we applaud, and believe that UCD is the way to go. We are hoping to demonstrate this in the coming years with further research into this new perspective on ship design.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank their respective colleagues at DNV GL and AHO for fruitful discussions, as well as Svein Gunnar Kjde, Adrian Paulsen and Paal Holter for great inspiration, and Ron Kim, Per-Johan Sandlund and Carl-Fredrik Rehn for their preliminary research and most of the illustrations included in this paper.
8. REFERENCES
1. Kristiansen, H. and Nordby K., Towards a Design Simulator for Offshore Ship Bridges, ECMS, 212-218, 2013. 2. Hjelseth, S., Emerging Tools for Conceptual Design: The Use of Game Engines To Design Future User Scenarios In The Fuzzy Front End Of Maritime Innovation, ECMS, 2013. 3. Sevaldson, B., et al., Systems Oriented Design in Maritime Design, Systems Engineering in Ship and Offshore Design Conference, Royal Institute of Naval Architects, London, 2012. 4. Stickdorn, M., Schneider, J., and Andrews K., This is service design thinking: Basics, tools, cases, Wiley, 2011. 5. Clatworthy, S., Service innovation through touch-points: Development of an innovation toolkit for the first stages of new service development, Oslo School for Architecture and Design, 2011. 6. Ulstein, T., and Brett P., Critical systems thinking in ship design approaches, International Maritime Design Conference, Glasgow, 2012. 7. Papanikolaou, A., et al., State of the art report on design for X, IMDC, 2009. 8. Andrews, D., Marine requirements elucidation and the nature of preliminary ship design, Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects Part A: International Journal of Maritime Engineering, 153 (Part A1), 2011 9. Brett, P., Interview on DNV GL Maritime Advisory role in ship design and operation, E. Gernez, et al., DNV GL, 2014. 10. DeNucci, T.W., Capturing Design: Improving Conceptual Ship Design through the Capture of Design Rationale, VSSD, 2012. 11. van Bruinessen, T., Hopman, H., and Smulders, F., Towards a Different View on Ship Design: The Development of Ships Observed Through a Social-Technological Perspective, ASME 32nd International Conference on Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2013. Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects 12. Evans, J.H., Basic design concepts, Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers, 71(4): 671-678, 1959. 13. Levander, K. Innovative Ship Design, Proceedings of the 8th International Marine Design Conference, Athens, Greece, 2003. 14. Papanikolaou, A., Holistic ship design optimization, Computer-Aided Design, 42 (11): 1028-1044, 2010. 15. Bertram, V. and H. Schneekluth, Ship design for efficiency and economy, Butterworth- Heinemann, 1998. 16. Lamb, T., Ship design and construction, Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, 2004. 17. DNVGL, DNV GL reduces the impact of variations in ship construction, press release, 2014. 18. Nowacki, H., Five decades of computer-aided ship design, Computer-Aided Design, 42(11): 956-969, 2010. 19. Andrews, D., The True Nature of Ship Concept Design And What it Means for the Future Development of CASD, COMPIT, Volker Bertram: Cortona, Italy, 2013. 20. John, D., Special CAD/CAM, Naval Architect Magazine, Royal Institution of Naval Architects, 2014 21. Duchateau, E.A., van Oers, B.J., and. Hopman, J., Interactive Steering of a Ship Synthesis Model for Early Requirements Elucidation, International Conference on Computer Applications in Shipbuilding (ICCAS 2013), Busan, Korea, Royal Institute of Naval Architects, 2013. 22. Eknes, A., Interview on DNV GL Maritime Advisory role in ship design and operation, E. Gernez, et al., DNV GL, 2014. 23. Pawling, R., et al., An Integrated Approach to Style Definition in Early Stage Design, COMPIT, Volker Bertram: Cortona, Italy, 2013. 24. Semini, M., et al., Assessing ship design and construction strategies from the perspective of the customer order decoupling point, Department of Production and Quality Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 2013. 25. Hwang, H.-J., Han, S., and Kim, Y.-D., Mapping 2D midship drawings into a 3D ship hull model based on STEP AP218, Computer- Aided Design, 36(6):537-547, 2004. 26. Morais, D., Waldie, M., and Larkins, D., Driving the Adoption of Cutting Edge Technology in Shipbuilding, COMPIT, Volker Bertram: Hamburg, Germany, 2011. 27. Thomson, D., and. Renard, P., The Digital Handover Shipyards as Producers of Life- Cycle Maintenance Models , COMPIT, Volker Bertram: Cortona, Italy, 2013. 28. Foerster, T., et al. Integrating ogc web processing services into geospatial mass-market applications, Advanced Geographic Information Systems & Web Services, IEEE, 2009. 29. Nordby, K. and Komandur, S., Evolution of a Laboratory for Design of Advanced Ship Bridges, HCI International 2014-Posters, Extended Abstracts, Springer, 2014. 30. Lurs, S., and Nordby, K., Field studies in ships bridge development, International Conference on Human Factors for Ship Design, Royal Institution of Naval Architects, London, 2014. 31. Keahey, K., et al., Sky computing, Internet Computing, IEEE, 13(5): 43-51, 2009. 32. Dimopoulos, G.G., et al., A general-purpose process modelling framework for marine energy systems, Energy Conversion and Management, 86: 325-339, 2014. 33. Batchelor, J., Autodesk's engine 'will change the way games are made and buildings are designed, 2014. 34. Hagen, J.E., Global e-navigasjon: Muligheter for norsk maritim industri, e-nav.no 2014. Kysteverket and Oslo School of Architecture and Design: Oslo, Norway, 2014. 35. DNVGL, DNV GL -The Future of Shipping, 2014.
9. AUTHORS BIOGRAPHIES
Etienne Gernez currently holds the position of project engineer at DNV GL Maritime Advisory. He is responsible for facilitating ship design and operation towards greener, safer and smarter practices. His previous experience includes student supervision at AHO, T.U Delft, T.U Eindhoven, Mines X Paris, Stanford University and open innovation projects for the exploration and conservation of the environment (Protei, Ocean Collaboration Platform).
Kjetil Nordby currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Nordby is the project manager of the Ulstein Bridge Concept design research project, and holds a Masters in Interaction design from Ume University, and a PhD from Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Birger Sevaldson is the current chairman of OCEAN Design Research Association and Professor at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He is an academic and designer working in a broad field of design and architecture. Sevaldson has been developing concepts in design computing, digital creativity in design and architecture since 1990, and has been lecturing and teaching in Norway, Europe, Asia and the USA.
Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects
Figure 1: Simplified timeline showing actors, information flow and value creation.
Figure 2: A service design perspective on ship design. Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK 2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects
Figure 3: mock-up of a strategy board game with the goal of exploring fundamental questions early in the design process: where are we now, who is involved, how can we work together, what happens next and how does this link to the other steps?
Figure 7: the user is at the centre of the process, and technology helps different users work together.
Oceanographica Automatica/Hydrobionics - With Hans-Jakob Føsker and Per-Johan Sandlund, Industrial Design, The Oslo School For Architecture and Design, Winter-Spring 2014