Thesis project: Remote Collaboration and UX

Semcon is a global company active in the areas of engineering services and product information. The Group has nearly 3,000 employees with extensive experience from many different industries. We develop technologies, products, plants and information solutions along the entire development chain and also provide many services including quality control, training and methodology development. Semcon boosts customers' sales and competitive strength by providing them with innovative solutions, design and solid engineering solutions. The Group had sales of SEK 2.7 billion in 2014 and activities at more than 45 sites in Sweden, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, China, Spain and Norway.

We are looking for master thesis students in Interaction design, UX and software prototyping for the research project MERCO. Our User Experience team is a multi-cultural group with three focus areas: Human Factors, Interaction Design and Research & Innovation. We work with design and development for some of the leading automotive, medical and industrial enterprises in the world. We are experts in the bridge between physical and digital products, and the possibilities and services that make a coherent ecosystem.

Who are you?

You are about to complete a Master’s degree with a major in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction or Computer Science or similar. Your role in the project is to create working prototypes of remote collaboration concepts and test them in the offices of Semcon and Ericsson, in order to improve communication and coherency over distances. Since the project spans over programming, concept development, use testing and corporate culture, we are looking for students with different backgrounds that can work together to take on the full set of challenges, e.g. one with a "softer" UX / IxD background and one software developer to work in a pair. A genuine interest and understanding of human communication, as well as experience with prototyping is needed.

A PhD student tied to the project will be able to help with some of the programming work (likely to be done in C#). We are looking for students for the autumn of 2015 as well as the spring of 2016.

About the project

Today, team processes such as idea generation, complex decision-making or expert-novice transfer of practical knowledge typically require a physical presence of all partners. This is mainly because of the fact that today's technology is not able to capture, transfer and display the huge information flow in such a teamwork. As a result, existing videoconferencing systems are not accepted by users. Time and money are spent for travelling to collocated meetings, since this is currently the only way to efficiently perform teamwork. Consequently, many companies still lack any digital support in this situation so far.

Within a colocated team, information is not only exchanged by the generated artifacts on the common task space, but also by using pointing gestures in the work space to underline the spoken word. In addition, the communication space carries facial expressions, nodding or shrugging , verbal communication, eye contact, etc. The outcome of this project will be new collaboration systems in hard- and software that can be immediately deployed by the partners to improve net-based collaboration.

The project MERCO, Mediated Effective Remote Collaboration, is a collaboration between Semcon, Ericsson, TouchTech and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and ETH Zurich, AVS, Intelliconcept in Switzerland.