Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

In today’s market place, it is essential that the product sold reflects the wants, needs and desires of the consumer; whom holds more power and awareness than ever. This is greatly evident in the automotive industry, where great time and resources are placed into creating designs that satisfy the demand of the target market. This paper focuses on identifying the requirements for a collaborative based approach to creating concepts prior to the conceptual design phase. Investigation of mood boards and trends in the automotive industry and the analysis of automotive sales brochures spawned the initial idea for the Photo Album approach. It was concluded that through considering the semantics of images, elements of the conceptual design brief could be greater appreciated, but analogous to a photo album, the series of images could create a story that represented and cemented the elements of the concept together. Relatively new technologies of folksonomies and social networking sites were considered in order to create a dynamic collaborative working environment. It was concluded that the Photo Album could be a useful reference document, however the collaborative nature and culturing of comprehension of the design brief is what gives great potential to the approach.