'Push the Industrial Complexity Away': A Vision for using Data Collection and Mixed Reality as an Analysis Tool in Industrial Product Co-Design

The rapid changes experienced in the industrial development processes to ensure interconnectivity and customization have led to an increasing need to adopt collaborative design practices and consider end-users' context at earliest stages. Such contextual information generates large amounts of data that are usually oversimplistic, overlooking the spatial dimension in its representation and visualization. Usually, this is analyzed in post-processing using digital tools, which lack proper methods to analyze the information collected. This position paper proposes a vision for using data collection and Mixed Reality (MR). thus supporting industrial product co-design. This combination can be highly flexible in providing a perspective that overlays user feedback in a digital form on top of a physical artifact. As such, it may he possible to conduct co-design tasks in a more informed manner, having a higher level of awareness of the product characteristics. These and other arguments are presented and future directions are proposed.