Human-centered design approach for manufacturing assistance systems based on Design Sprints

Manufacturing assistance systems getting more and more relevance for companies. The options for the design and configurations are various. At the same time, the business and user requirements are important success factor for productive and accepted systems. Today many companies have difficulties to design and implement manufacturing assistance systems. There is a high need of a systematic and human-centered approach to identify and design the suitable assistance functions based on various business requirements and user needs. To ensure a successful design process this paper presents a human-centered approach for designing manufacturing assistance systems. Based on Design Sprints the paper provides a holistic systematic iterative procedure to design all levels of assistance systems. The validation shows that the approach is a fast, flexible and practical method for developing powerful manufacturing assistance systems. Furthermore, the developed approach can be used in a high variety of applications regarding Industry 4.0 use cases such as human-robot-collaboration or any type of production software where user acceptance is crucial. The presented paper contributes to the conference's topics human-centered design, design for rapid industrialization and design for user-friendliness as well as user-experience.