Designing for Future Professional Activity – Examples from Ship Bridge Concept Design

This paper proposes a design approach for generating radical design concepts for professional activity. The approach includes analysis of domain-specific work activity, user-experience goals setting as well as work domain and technology trend foresight. The intention of the approach is that the concept solutions reflect the existing means and professional recourses applied in work activity, the potential benefits of future technology, and the existing and future challenges particular to a certain work domain. This approach is exemplified with a ship command bridge design case in which future bridge concepts were generated for three ship types: tugboats, platform supply vessels, and cargo ships. Several subject-matter expert interviews and observations were conducted for gathering understanding required to generate the concept ideas. From the existing user-centred design approaches, our approach combines elements of experience design, co-design, and contextual design, but includes certain features for the purpose of creating radical instead of incremental design solutions, the latter typically being the result of user-centred design. These features include, futurology, generation of broad systems usability design goals with Core-Task Analysis method, reformulation of user-experience goals into themes, stories, or personas, and co-design in the end of the concept design process.