‘Push the Industrial Complexity Away’: A Vision for using Data Collection and Mixed Reality as an Analysis Tool in Industrial Product Co-Design

The rapid changes experienced in the industrial development processes to ensure interconnectivity and customization have led to an increasing need to adopt collaborative design practices and consider end-users' context at earliest stages. Such contextual information generates large amounts of data that are usually oversimplistic, over-looking the spatial dimension in its representation and visualization. Usually, this is analyzed in post-processing using digital tools, which lack proper methods to analyze the information collected. This position paper proposes a vision for using data collection and Mixed Reality (MR), thus supporting industrial product co-design. This combination can be highly flexible in providing a perspective that overlays user feedback in a digital form on top of a physical artifact. As such, it may be possible to conduct co-design tasks in a more informed manner, having a higher level of awareness of the product characteristics. These and other arguments are presented and future directions are proposed.