OBPD Online Based Product Development

Overview

The PBL project courses at Aalto Design Factory involve students from Aalto but also from other Universities around the globe. As a part of learning, the student teams need utilize different online working methods. However, the teams find it often very difficult and inefficient to implement meetings, ideating sessions and doing decision making online when team members are working from different locations. It it also difficult to build trust and enhance team spirit when you are not physically in the same place. Similar issues are emerging in international companies in a daily basis.

The challenge for this pilot is to utilize exiciting technologies, such as video conferencing, augmented reality & virtual reality, to make online working more appealing, efficient or even better than traditional face to face team working. This task will be given to an interdisciplinary student team participating the PDP (Product Development Project) -course and the pilot will be called Online Based Product Development (OBPD). The team will consists approximately of 6 Aalto students and 4 students from partnering university. The results will be presented at Product Design Gala 2018 at the end of May in Aalto Design Factory.

The student team will look for a justified solution for this given task by participating the PDP -course that lasts for whole academic year. The team will seek for solution by using user centered design methodology.  This process includes market research-, benchmarking- , concept generation- & user testing -phases. As a result of the process the team will have a physical prototype or demonstration that can be used as a proof of concept for enhanced onlined based product development process. Since the team will have members in at least two different countries they will be also facing the difficulties of remote working in their own work during this pilot. Ideally the team will find a justified solution that can be developed further and optimally used in Aalto as well as other partner institutions and companies having the same issues with remote team working. The PdP team will also test their tools in practice with 1-2 other, similar student teams coordinated by IdeaSquare in other universities. The first such candidate is Challenge Based Innovation @ Mediterranean -course, also starting in September.