ARTHUR: A Collaborative Augmented Environment for Architectural Design and Urban Planning

Projects in the area of architectural design and urban planning typically engage several architects as well as experts from other professions. While the design and review meetings thus often involve a large number of cooperating participants, the actual design is still done by the individuals in the time in between those meetings using desktop PCs and CAD applications. A real collaborative approach to architectural design and urban planning is often limited to early paper-based sketches.In order to overcome these limitations, we designed and realized the ARTHUR system, an Augmented Reality (AR) enhanced round table to support complex design and planning decisions for architects. WhileAR has been applied to this area earlier, our approach does not try to replace the use of CAD systems but rather integrates them seamlessly into the collaborative AR environment. The approach is enhanced by intuitiveinteraction mechanisms that can be easily con-figured for different application scenarios.

The E-learning Circle – a holistic software design tool for e-learning

The article introduces the E-learning Circle, a tool developed to assure the quality of the software design process of e-learning systems, considering pedagogical principles as well as technology. The E-learning Circle consists of a number of concentric circles which are divided into three sectors. The content of the inner circles is based on pedagogical principles, while the outer circle specifies how the pedagogical principles may be implemented with technology. The circle’s centre is dedicated to the subject taught, ensuring focus on the specific subject’s properties. The three sectors represent the student, the teacher and the learning objectives. The strengths of the E-learning Circle are the compact presentation combined with the overview it provides, as well as the usefulness of a design tool dealing with complexity, providing a common language and embedding best practice. The E-learning Circle is not a prescriptive method, but is useful in several design models and processes. The article presents two projects where the E-learning Circle was used as a design tool.

Not for Designers: On the Inadequacies of EU Design Law and How to Fix It

Design rights represent an interesting example of how the EU legislature has successfully regulated an otherwise heterogeneous field of law. Yet this type of protection is not for all. The tools created by EU intervention have been drafted paying much more attention to the industry sector rather than to designers themselves. In particular, modern, digitally based, individual or small-sized, 3D printing, open designers and their needs are largely neglected by such legislation. There is obviously nothing wrong in drafting legal tools around the needs of an industrial sector with an important role in the EU economy, on the contrary, this is a legitimate and good decision of industrial policy. However, good legislation should be fair, balanced, and (technologically) neutral in order to offer suitable solutions to all the players in the market, and all the citizens in the society, without discriminating the smallest or the newest: the cost would be to stifle innovation. The use of printing machinery to manufacture physical objects created digitally thanks to computer programs such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software has been in place for quite a few years, and it is actually the standard in many industrial fields, from aeronautics to home furniture. The change in recent years that has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting factor is a combination between the opularization of such technologies (price, size, usability, quality) and the diffusion of a culture based on access to and reuse of knowledge. We will call this blend Open Design. It is probably still too early, however, to say whether 3D printing will be used in the future to refer to a major event in human history, or instead will be relegated to a lonely Wikipedia entry similarly to ³Betamax² (copyright scholars are familiar with it for other reasons). It is not too early, however, to develop a legal analysis that will hopefully contribute to clarifying the major issues found in current EU design law structure, why many modern open designers will probably find better protection in copyright, and whether they can successfully rely on open licenses to achieve their goals. With regard to the latter point, we will use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to test our hypothesis due to their unique characteristic to be modular, i.e. to have different license elements (clauses) that licensors can choose in order to adapt the license to their own needs.”

CAD Files and European Design Law

Three-dimensional printing (“3DP”) is an additive manufacturing technology that starts with a virtual 3D model of the object to be printed, the so-called Computer-Aided-Design (“CAD”) file. This file, when sent to the printer, gives instructions to the device on how to build the object layer-by-layer. This paper explores whether design protection is available under the current European regulatory framework for designs that are computer-created by means of CAD software, and, if so, under what circumstances. The key point is whether the appearance of a product, embedded in a CAD file, could be regarded as a protectable element under existing legislation. To this end, it begins with an inquiry into the concepts of “design” and “product”, set forth in Article 3 of the Community Design Regulation No. 6/2002 (“CDR”). Then, it considers the EUIPO’s practice of accepting 3D digital representations of designs. The enquiry goes on to illustrate the implications that the making of a CAD file available online might have. It suggests that the act of uploading a CAD file onto a 3D printing platform may be tantamount to a disclosure for the purposes of triggering unregistered design protection, and for appraising the state of the prior art. It also argues that, when measuring the individual character requirement, the notion of “informed user” and “the designer’s degree of freedom” may need to be reconsidered in the future. The following part touches on the exceptions to design protection, with a special focus on the repairs clause set forth in Article 110 CDR. The concluding part explores different measures that may be implemented to prohibit the unauthorised creation and sharing of CAD files embedding design-protected products.

Rechnergestützte Analyse von mehrfach eingescherten Seiltrieben

Die Bestimmung der Anzahl der Biegewechsel von laufenden Drahtseilen ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil bei der Betriebsdaueranalyse von Seiltrieben. Auf Seilabschnitte, die während der Betriebszeit die meisten Biegewechsel erfahren, sollte bei einer Seilprüfung besonderes Augenmerk gelegt werden. Gerade bei mehrfacher Einscherung ist jedoch nicht immer von vorn herein ersichtlich, um welche Seilabschnitte es sich dabei handelt. Auf der Basis der Geometrie des mehrfach eingescherten Seiltriebs wird ein rechnergestütztes Analyseverfahren zur Ermittlung der Anzahl der Biegewechsel entlang des Drahtseils bei einem Arbeitsspiel vorgestellt.

Auslegung, Konstruktion und Fertigung von strömungsmechanischen Funktionsprototypen mittels Rapid Manufacturing

Bei der Fertigung von Funktionsbauteilen für Strömungsversuche spielt das Design und die Komplexität der Bauteilgeometrie eine wesentliche Rolle. Ziel der interdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit der Lehrstühle Strömungsmaschinen, Rechnereinsatz in der Konstruktion und Fertigungstechnik mit dem Rapid Technology Center (RTC) an der Universität Duisburg-Essen ist es, das Potenzial der additiven Fertigungsverfahren bei der Herstellung von Funktionsprototypen für strömungsmechanische Anwendungen effektiv zu nutzen. An verschiedenen, auf dieser Kooperation beruhenden, Best Practise Beispielen wird gezeigt wie das Laser-Sintern in die Prozesskette zur Herstellung von Laufrädern u. Ä. in unterschiedlichen Größenordnungen integriert werden kann. In diesem Zusammenhang werden auch die Vorüberlegungen (z. B. durch Simulation), Wechselwirkungen und Folgeprozesse, die mit dieser Fertigungstechnologie verbunden sind, aufgezeigt.

Auslegung, Konstruktion und Fertigung von strömungsmechanischen Funktionsprototypen mittels Rapid Manufacturing

Bei der Fertigung von Funktionsbauteilen für Strömungsversuche spielt das Design und die Komplexität der Bauteilgeometrie eine wesentliche Rolle. Ziel der interdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit der Lehrstühle Strömungsmaschinen, Rechnereinsatz in der Konstruktion und Fertigungstechnik mit dem Rapid Technology Center (RTC) an der Universität Duisburg-Essen ist es, das Potenzial der additiven Fertigungsverfahren bei der Herstellung von Funktionsprototypen für strömungsmechanische Anwendungen effektiv zu nutzen. An verschiedenen, auf dieser Kooperation beruhenden, Best Practise Beispielen wird gezeigt wie das Laser-Sintern in die Prozesskette zur Herstellung von Laufrädern u. Ä. in unterschiedlichen Größenordnungen integriert werden kann. In diesem Zusammenhang werden auch die Vorüberlegungen (z. B. durch Simulation), Wechselwirkungen und Folgeprozesse, die mit dieser Fertigungstechnologie verbunden sind, aufgezeigt.

Constructing a user experience user experience-based mobile learning environment

Mobile learning, in the past defined as learning with mobile devices, now refers to any type of learning-on-the-go or learning that takes advantage of mobile technologies. This new definition shifted its focus from the mobility of technology to the mobility of the learner (O'Malley and Stanton 2002; Sharples, Arnedillo-Sanchez et al. 2009). Placing emphasis on the mobile learner’s perspective requires studying “how the mobility of learners augmented by personal and public technology can contribute to the process of gaining new knowledge, skills, and experience” (Sharples, Arnedillo-Sanchez et al. 2009). The demands of an increasingly knowledge based society and the advances in mobile phone technology are combining to spur the growth of mobile learning. Around the world, mobile learning is predicted to be the future of online learning, and is slowly entering the mainstream education. However, for mobile learning to attain its full potential, it is essential to develop more advanced technologies that are tailored to the needs of this new learning environment. A research field that allows putting the development of such technologies onto a solid basis is user experience design, which addresses how to improve usability and therefore user acceptance of a system. Although there is no consensus definition of user experience, simply stated it focuses on how a person feels about using a product, system or service. It is generally agreed that user experience adds subjective attributes and social aspects to a space that has previously concerned itself mainly with ease-of-use. In addition, it can include users’ perceptions of usability and system efficiency. Recent advances in mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies further underline the importance of human-computer interaction and user experience (feelings, motivations, and values) with a system. Today, there are plenty of reports on the limitations of mobile technologies for learning (e.g., small screen size, slow connection), but there is a lack of research on user experience with mobile technologies. This dissertation will fill in this gap by a new approach in building a user experience-based mobile learning environment. The optimized user experience we suggest integrates three priorities, namely a) content, by improving the quality of delivered learning materials, b) the teaching and learning process, by enabling live and synchronous learning, and c) the learners themselves, by enabling a timely detection of their emotional state during mobile learning. In detail, the contributions of this thesis are as follows: • A video codec optimized for screencast videos which achieves an unprecedented compression rate while maintaining a very high video quality, and a novel UI layout for video lectures, which together enable truly mobile access to live lectures. • A new approach in HTTP-based multimedia delivery that exploits the characteristics of live lectures in a mobile context and enables a significantly improved user experience for mobile live lectures. • A non-invasive affective learning model based on multi-modal emotion detection with very high recognition rates, which enables real-time emotion detection and subsequent adaption of the learning environment on mobile devices. The technology resulting from the research presented in this thesis is in daily use at the School of Continuing Education of Shanghai Jiaotong University (SOCE), a blended-learning institution with 35.000 students.

The Future of Ubiquitous Learning

This book explores emerging pedagogical perspectives based on the design of new learning spaces supported by digital technologies and brings together some of the best research in this field. The book is divided into three themes: foundations of emerging pedagogies, learning designs for emerging pedagogies and, adaptive and personalized learning. The chapters provide up-to-date information about new pedagogical proposals, and examples for acquiring the requisite skills to both design and support learning opportunities that improve the potential of available technologies.