Högskolan i Skövde

Digitalization and automation in industry can have both positive and negative effects on social sustainability. On one hand it can be a basis for monotonous, uncreative, and even dangerous workplaces and in some cases might even result in people losing their work. On the other hand, it can be a base for ergonomically sound and inclusive work, engaging everyone in improvements. This project aims for moving the focus on positive effects for social sustainability while still staying cost efficient and effective in economic and ecologic sustainability for digitalization and automation of work instructions and training in manual operations like assembly, machine operation & setup, maintenance, and material handling. The Industry 4.0 paradigm offers radically increased opportunities for doing just that. For example, increased digitization can create efficiency improvements through shorter lead times and reduced disruptions to production. New generations of technology and software as well as information dissemination can be accelerated and the traceability of products and materials in the industrial systems can be greatly increased. Digitization also provides opportunities to increase industrial resilience to challenges coming from elsewhere, such as demographic change and climate threats. Advanced application of digitization is seen by industries and decision-makers as the most important enabler for achieving the strategic sustainability goals and Agenda2030. A crucial factor for competitiveness is the human contribution. Here too, digitalisation is radically changing the conditions. In the last 20 years, work instructions have been transformed from printed text on paper into an increasingly digital representation. As knowledge increases about how work instructions for the manufacturing industry should be designed, they are rarely designed according to user conditions. At best, this results in a missed opportunity for performance improvements and at worst, it could potentially result in quality deficiencies, efficiency deficiencies and a lower degree of inclusion of staff groups. Digitization and automation permeate both society and industry more and more and there are many different technologies on the market. These can contribute to both increased efficiency and flexibility for the industry. However, there are a lot of challenges to both implement, design, and use instructions. Studies conducted in industry 2014–2018 show that operators and assembly workers only use instructions in 20–25% of cases in the operational phase when they are perceived as inefficient (Fast-Berglund & Stahre, 2013; Mattsson et al., 2018). Of course, this also increases the risks of, for example, assembly errors by not using instructions to the extent that they should be used. The corporate culture and standards are also an important part of how instructions are created and used. Depending on the structure and condition of the company and the production unit, for example, an assembly instruction at one company may include information about the product, process, and work environment, while an assembly instruction at another company includes completely different or only parts of this information. Of course, this is a natural consequence of sometimes far-inherited corporate cultures and traditions, but experience has also shown that it is to a very large extent the nature of work that defines the type of support system needed. In line with increased automation and increasing product variation as a result of increased customisation, operators’ tasks will require more creative work than before where the aim is to enable and handle the results of individual workers' creative thoughts about improvements in their own work situation, increasing cognitive load (Taylor et al., 2020). The development of digitalisation has created new opportunities for improved communication among employees in the manufacturing industry (Oesterreich & Teuteberg, 2016). Therefore, this technological development can and should support operators cognitively (Kaasinen et al., 2020; Mattsson et al., 2016). Although many new digital technologies are being developed and are available (Romero et al., 2016), it is still difficult to implement these so that people's cognitive work is supported. This is often due to the fact that the implementation does not take place in a way that people are comfortable with (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). In many cases, humans are expected to adapt to technology and not the other way around (Thorvald et al., 2021). To implement better support for their operators, companies should focus on identifying the information needs that exist (Haghi et al., 2018) and then visualize it in a way that is useful to operators. The central aim for the project is to demonstrate how knowledge and systematic development of cognitive support and information design can increase quality and flexibility in future production and how this can be considered in the implementation of digital work instructions. In the industrial case studies, current state-of-practice in information presentation will be investigated and analysed together with state-of-the art knowledge and technology to map successful efforts in industry, identify what it is that makes them successful, or how a particularly challenging situation can be further improved through our knowledge of cognitive work in production.

We detail the results of an ongoing study into the preference of workers in 6 different industrial companies for assembly instruction display types and modalities for their tasks. This study is performed as a part of a project that aims to create a theoretical framework for understanding requirements for instruction presentation in industry, and providing guidance to the creators of assembly instructions. The study, as well as the project as a whole, aims to expand on approaches from the Industry 4.0 framework, with a particular focus on the more recent Operator 4.0 approach that adds a focus on more human-centric aspects of digitalisation in industry. The study being presented is comprised of facility visits to each partner company where the current state of practice was presented by each company, an examination of information presentation and ope- rating procedures by the authors, and in-depth interviews with assembly workers at each site. All companies examined deal with variants in production, and the comple- xity of assembly spans from low to extremely high. The companies involved mostly rely on experienced workers, with high training, and relatively long times to train new personnel. The interviews led to findings such as simplified images being strongly pre- ferred for both beginners and experienced workers, with an emphasis on the image matching the worker’s viewpoint to the product, and experienced workers preferring simplified images with highlighted markings for details that can be seen from where the task is performed, and more. The findings will be used in further work to create a theoretical framework around digital work instructions, as well as used directly to help partner companies better standardise their instructions to support the cognitive abilities and limitations of their assembly workers. The goal with this is to create safe, comfortable and profitable workplaces that fulfil goals of social sustainability in the long term.

The Operator 4.0 typology depicts the collaborative operator as one of eight operator working scenarios of operators in Industry 4.0. It signifies collaborative robot applications and the interaction between humans and robots working collaboratively or cooperatively towards a common goal. For this collaboration to run seamlessly and effortlessly, human-robot communication is essential. We briefly discuss what trust, predictability, and intentions are, before investigating the communicative features of both self-driving cars and collaborative robots. We found that although communicative external HMIs could arguably provide some benefits in both domains, an abundance of clues to what an autonomous car or a robot is about to do are easily accessible through the environment or could be created simply by understanding and designing legible motions.

Presented is a literature study into the importance of how information in assembly instructions in manual assembly is presented, more specifically how various factors such as the complexity of the assembly itself, the mental and physical workload of the worker, as well as the experience and skill level of the worker affect the requirements for information presentation. The requirements made by Industry 4.0 on flexibility in production lines and an increased number of variants produced causes increased demands on workers, which leads to more cognitive demands being made on assembly workers. Studies exist around assembly instruction modes, but have in many cases ignored factors such as worker skill level, mental workload, and task complexity and how these affect the requirements for information presentation, which is a major contribution of this study. The findings are that no single solution fits all requirements, but that the aforementioned factors should be taken into account.

In this paper, we detail research and development of data-driven personas in the IPS-IMMA digital human modelling system. Semi-automatically generating personas for working with user experience (UX) aspects of the Operator 4.0 side of Industry 4.0 is suggested as a viable approach for contributing to operator well-being and diversity by supporting workstation designers to take these factors into account early in the workstation design process. These data-driven personas are being developed to be generated using anthropometric data from the manikin family generation module of IPS-IMMA. Specific design suggestions are presented, what should be taken into account and how that will be implemented, and the current state of development of the data-driven personas module is discussed. Prototypes are planned under the coming year.

Functional tones is a concept that originates in theoretical biology and resembles how the concept ‘affordances’ is used. Both functional tones and affordances are concepts dealing with particularly salient features in an individual’s immediate environment. The concept of affordances has proven useful for practitioners of usability and design as it supports intuitive ways of classifying how action possibilities match between a person and an object [1]. Functional tones have, however, thus far remained obscure among practitioners, despite functional tones having a stronger theoretical foundation and facilitates a deeper and more human-centred analysis of interaction. The functional tones related to an object depend not only on the modes of sensation and action the perceiver is capable of, but also more subjective aspects such as experience, motivation and emotions. Using functional tones in design or analysis of interaction provides a fundamentally user experience centred perspective while avoiding the philosophical luggage of affordances.

Applying game-like elements to tasks or computer systems meant for serious, non-game, activities is becoming more common, and is seen as a way to support users in learning a system or to support users in performing tasks better. Applying game-like elements requires an understanding of users, the target task, and what can motivate the target users in their tasks. As in any system development, the success of the design requires validating, and this may be done multiple times in the development cycle. Some concepts, such as usability or user experience have well-established testing methods, while gamification is still a relatively immature field and evaluation methods are still being developed. This paper follows the first evaluation of a gamification system to aid with onboarding new users into the IPS IMMA digital human modelling system, offering details on the heuristic evaluation method. So early in the process, it is inevitable that problems were found, largely to do with how the motivation of users was handled, and multiple suggestions for improvements are offered.

This paper presents a discussion on the role of embodied interaction with a basis in social embodiment effects and how they can be viewed in light of manufacturing ergonomics. The social embodiment effects are four statements, grounded in empirical findings, which highlight the interplay of social stimuli, embodied responses, and cognitive processing. They suggest and base an argument for how embodiment is central to cognitive processing, how bodily states interact extensively with cognitive states, and ultimately how embodied interaction is ubiquitous in human cognition. The paper further presents a view on how human based manufacturing can be studied in light of this argument, exploring other areas where social embodiment has been further researched, with an aim to suggest examples of where social embodiment effects might be found in manufacturing ergonomics and form a basis for future investigations. 

The aim of this paper is to highlight some benefits of incorporating usability/user experience (UX) approaches in the software development process of research projects advancing digital human modeling (DHM), and how these processes, approaches, and methods can help keeping the development process more focused and efficient. Research projects that contain large software development components may receive funding only to complete the core tasks, and including additional persons in a project may seem like a waste of resources. This paper introduces user research that relied on a UX approach called contextual inquiry to ascertain user goals and how those might be translated into features for DHM named IMMA that has been developed as a part of numerous research projects in the last decade. The goal of the study is to support DHM development in general through highlighting methods and approaches that can be used, with specific results aimed to support the continued development of IMMA. Results clearly show that existing functions do not support the goals of the user group examined, and highlights the need of understanding user goals and creating functions to support achieving those goals, rather than assuming what functionalities might be needed. By understanding user goals, interpreting those into activities and functionalities time and resources can be used more effectively, which is important for small to medium research projects, where both time and budget may be limited.

The fields of human factors and ergonomics are systemic by nature, focusing on studying complex interaction between human and technology. However, the levels of explanation have resulted in physical or cognitive ergonomics. Modern understandings of human cognition and technology-mediated interaction, such as embodied cognition, activity theory and user experience (UX) is used as a frame of reference to analyze and illustrate the usage of a digital human modeling (DHM) tool in practice. In so doing, we try to narrow the gap between physical and cognitive ergonomics through embodied tool use. An identified core problem is to understand how a 2D devices should properly interact within 3D objects and manikins in a DMH tool that results in negative UX. The embodied concept of body schema clarifies the cognitive foundation for the negative UX. Some future work is presented, which could be beneficial for DHM, and, in the long run, promote a positive UX at work for various end-users of DHM tools.