Work Package 2: Learning from Use
The design process is a part of the longer life cycle of a product, and that life cycle is itself part of a cycle of development both of the information describing the artefact and the commercial, manufacturing and operational systems in which it is embedded, and of the knowledge embedded in the communities that develop, support and use these systems. In the context of the new product-service environment, products are upgraded, remanufactured and used for different purposes, and, more importantly, systems are persistent - they outlive products - and the knowledge associated with products or particular sub-systems is reused for future generations of products. WP2 will study the dynamics of this knowledge in the context of products being embedded in systems of systems, building on both the information organisation approaches developed in Work Package 1 and on the knowledge life cycle management approaches developed in WP3.
There are three tasks in WP2 with the following objectives:
- to develop approaches and techniques, and the associated theoretical foundation, for the capture and representation of the experience gained of the product operation through life;
- to identify socio-technical approaches that foster the development of active communities of practice and systems that promote learning of stakeholders' responses to the product in use through life; and
- to develop measures of information value, and approaches to the support of decision-making on information retention.
The deliverables from this WP will comprise a framework for accumulation of knowledge from in-service experience, both functional and operational. This will include the theoretical underpinnings, information capture techniques, company organisational and management strategies and experimental computer implementations. In particular it will link to the integrated PPPIR modelling approach being proposed in WP1. This work will be bounded by the work on value, which will deliver assessment approaches and value metrics for the knowledge being accumulated.
