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1. Analyzing cognitive processes of a product/service-system design session using protocol analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0890060420000402  

   Sakao, Tomohiko; Gero, John; Mizuyama, Hajime (November 2020, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Product/service systems (PSSs) are increasingly found in markets, and more resources are being invested in PSS design. Despite the substantial research into PSS design, the current literature exhibits an incomplete understanding of it as a cognitive activity. This article demonstrates that the methods used to analyze product designers’ cognitive behavior can be used to produce comparable and commensurable results when analyzing PSS designers. It also generates empirical grounding for the development of hypotheses based on a cognitive study of a PSS design session in a laboratory environment using protocol analysis. This study is a part of a larger project comparing PSS design with product design. The results, which are based on the function–behavior–structure coding scheme, show that PSS design, when coded using this scheme, can be quantitatively compared with product design. Five hypotheses were developed based on the results of the study of this design session concerning where and how designers expend their cognitive design effort. These hypotheses can be used to design experiments that test them and provide the grounding for a fuller understanding of PSS design. 

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2. Perception of complexity in engineering design

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21574  

   Grogan, Paul_T (April 2021, Systems Engineering)

   Abstract This paper evaluates perception of complexity in a novel explanatory model that relates product performance and engineering effort. Complexity is an intermediate factor with two facets: it enables desired product performance but also requires effort to achieve. Three causal mechanisms explain how exponential growth bias, excess complexity, and differential perception lead to effort overruns. Secondary data from a human subject experiment validates the existence of perception of complexity as a context‐dependent factor that influences required design effort. A two‐level mixed effects regression model quantifies differences in perception among 40 design groups. Results summarize how perception of complexity may contribute to effort overruns and outline future work to further validate the explanatory model and causal mechanisms. 

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3. On the Co-Design of AV-Enabled Mobility Systems

   Zardini, Gioele; Lanzetti, Nicolas; Salazar, Mauro; Censi, Andrea; Frazzoli, Emilio; Pavone, Marco (September 2020, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   The design of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the design of AV-enabled mobility systems are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of AVs would impact their design and deployment process, whilst insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management decisions. This calls for tools to study such a coupling and co-design AVs and AV-enabled mobility systems in terms of different objectives. In this paper, we instantiate a framework to address such co-design problems. In particular, we leverage the recently developed theory of co-design to frame and solve the problem of designing and deploying an intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand system, whereby AVs service travel demands jointly with public transit, in terms of fleet sizing, vehicle autonomy, and public transit service frequency. Our framework is modular and compositional, allowing one to describe the design problem as the interconnection of its individual components and to tackle it from a system-level perspective. To showcase our methodology, we present a real-world case study for Washington D.C., USA. Our work suggests that it is possible to create user-friendly optimization tools to systematically assess costs and benefits of interventions, and that such analytical techniques might gain a momentous role in policy-making in the future. 

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4. Examining the Effects of Cognitive Assistive Agents on Team Coordination in Manufacturing Teams

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661401  

   S.R., Begerowski; F., Waldherr; J., Biddlecom; A., Traylor; M., Krugh; L., Mears; M.L., Shuffler (September 2022, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   This article details the motivation and design of an experiment to investigate the effects of artificially intelligent cognitive assistive agents on coordination efforts in manufacturing teams. As automation solutions become more accessible and products rapidly grow in complexity, there are significant calls to leverage abilities of both artificial agents and human workers to maximize team functioning and product output. As such, we propose an experimental design where we introduce a cognitive agent with two levels of autonomy (low, and high) into a team of participants during an assembly task. We hypothesized that cognitive assistive technologies would enhance coordination within assembly teams, leading to higher productivity and reduced errors, with initial data suggesting trends in support of these hypotheses. We seek to demonstrate the value of cognitive agents in augmenting human workers, allowing manufacturers to see the benefit of increased productivity while retaining value and relevance of human labor in the face of technological development. 

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5. Accountability and effort among street-level bureaucrats: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2021.1951408  

   Zarychta, Alan; Grillos, Tara; Andersson, Krister P. (August 2021, International Public Management Journal)

   Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to account by communities, supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort, we utilize data from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities. We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization reform to improved service delivery. 

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