Designing Cyber-Physical Production Systems for Industrial Set-Up: A Practice-Centred Approach

Industrial set-up has long been a focus of scientific research, largely because it entails substantial cost overhead for manufacturing companies. Whilst various efforts have been made to optimise this process, mainly in terms of time and other resources needed to accomplish it, to date little can be found in the HCI literature about how digital technologies can support workers who engage in it. This article sets out to addresses this gap in the literature by introducing a design case study carried out for the conception of a CPPS (Cyber-physical Production System) to support machine operators with industrial set-up. Our contribution is therefore threefold: first, we describe and discuss the results of an in-depth ethnographic study, carried out under the premises of the grounded design research paradigm, to uncover practices of machine operators to inform design. Second, we introduce a series of design implications drawn from those results. Finally, we demonstrate how those design implications have informed the participatory design activities pursued for the conception of the CPPS in question. In so doing, we advance the state of the art on the design of digital technologies to support people working with industrial set-up and open new research directions on the subject.