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TRENDS - Trends Research Enabler for Design Specifications
TRENDS' goal was that of achieving of an interactive software for the elaboration of design trend boards dedicated to product designers in B to C markets such as for the automotive and original equipment manufacturers.
Impact
The TRENDS project worked on reducing design delays, costs and notably improve product creativity thanks to a more efficient trend boards' elaboration process. Capable of cross lingual information retrieval capacities, TRENDS looked to offer multi-disciplinary support dedicated to specific professions involved in the early design process such as in marketing, innovation, design, and ergonomics areas.
Main innovation
Main scientific innovation brought by TRENDS was the passage of the innovative method of Conjoint Trends Analysis © from a manual version to a digital one.
To achieve this, TRENDS aimed to mobilise and greatly enhance three innovative technologies:
- Intelligent Web crawling to collect automatically images from the Web and other digital databases, using a semantic approach
- Automatic image analysis to automate the maximum of currently "hand-made" tasks during the elaboration of trend boards
- Semantic multimedia search engine to link lexical and iconic information on the base of semiotic and semantic knowledge
More details
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF 602KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF 928KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF 373KB)
- Trends Research Challenges (PDF 26KB)
- TREND website.
Work
Trends project wasorganized in 9 work-packages, following a user centered approach. This approach started with a consistent needs analysis including the future end users of the trends analysis in the field of car design.
Needs analysis corresponds to the first work package. In the second work package, the current manual Conjoint Trends Analysis method is transferred into a digital method giving birth to resulting software and interface. The work packages WP3, WP4, WP5, are related to the software development including the three technologies of intelligent agent, intelligent web and automatic image. These technology components have been integrated in a design environment. Early prototypes have been produced focusing both technology and acceptability risks with a continuous iterative feedback from end users. The end of prototyping with the feedback from end users WP7 corresponds to the whole TRENDS integration and development. The software elaboration was oriented toward a useful and user friendly interface enhanced by creative sessions, and an efficient Trends Oriented search engine. This search engine is able to integrate many kind of input data according to the needs analysis. In order to proceed to a validation of the approach on the ground, two complementary end users have been involved in the field of car design : STILE BERTONE and the research department of FIAT.
Administrative Details
- TRENDS is a Specific Targeted Research Project of the European Union's 6th Framework Programme - call 4.
- TRENDS contract number is IST-27916
- TRENDS started on 1 January 2006 and finished on 31 December 2008.
- The overall budget was of 2.45 million euro.
- 8 partners from 5 European countries have been involved in the project
List of Participants
- Laboratoire Conception de Produits et Innovation, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers (SERAM), FR
- Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), FR
- University of Leeds (IFF), UK
- University of CARDIFF, UK
- PERTinent et IMMédiat (PERTIMM), FR
- ROBOTIKER, Spain
- CRF (FIAT), Italy
- STILE BERTONE, Italy
Contact Person
- Project Coordinator: Carole Bouchard
- Laboratoire Conception de Produits et Innovation
- LCPI ENSAM
- 151 Bd de l'Hôpital
- 75013 PARIS - France
- Tel: +33 1 44 24 63 78
- Fax: +33 1 44 24 63 59
- Email: Carole Bouchard