Espen Strange and Kjetil Nordby
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Kongsberg Maritime| The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Ocean Industries Concept Lab
The topic of the introduction of new user interface technologies into the maritime domain is complicated, due to its complex industrial and regulatory structure. We report on the ongoing work seeking to accelerate the adoption of augmented reality technology in this domain by using open innovation processes. We apply two strategies in our case. First, we use an open innovation process to engage the system actors in the definition of new generic design guidelines for maritime augmented reality. Second, we integrate the work into an open innovation network, the OpenBridge design system, to leverage the existing momentum and industry adoption. We analyse the case as a social technical system (STS) using the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) model to describe our process and apply the Multi-Actor-Network (MAN) for Socio-Technical Regimes to identify the network actors. We use the analysis to describe the maritime industry as a social technical system, to explain how the OpenBridge Design system interferes with that system, and to describe how we plan to accelerate augmented reality through the existing OpenBridge channels. Our work shows an example of how STS and STS transition theory, combined with systems oriented design, can be used to illustrate user-centred open innovation processes as a part of larger complex systems. We argue that this is a useful tool enabling us to better understand the forces involved in industry-wide change processes.
KEYWORDS: OpenBridge, OpenAR, user-centered design, maritime sector, system-oriented design, multi-level perspective, open innovation, transition pathway