Design of user interface for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems

Abstract: The project was carried out at Karlstad University during the spring of 2014 as a degree project for a Degree of Bachelor of Science in Innovation and Design Engineering and consists of 22.5 ECTS. The supervisor was lecturer Lennart Wihk from Karlstad University. The examiner was professor Leo de Vin. The project was conducted for Swegon AB and dealt with developing a user interface for systems regulating climate parameters in indoor environments, such as hotel rooms or office environments. The area of focus has been on developing the user interface with regard to end users, giving it the right functions and making it easy to understand. Suggestions about how user interfaces of this type could look was to be delivered to Swegon. The project started with creating a foundation. This was done through literature studies, benchmarking and interviews. The information gained here was used to put together a list of requirements which was later used as a guide when developing and evaluating concepts. Idea generation-methods were used to generate concepts and the concepts were developed further to later be voted on by employees at Swegon. The votes were evaluated and two concepts were developed, based on the the voting outcome. The concepts are inspired by wishes from the end users (expressed in the interviews) and are developed with regard to principles of design. The concepts were made into prototypes, in the form of 3D-printed models. The results of the project, in short: • Two image boards. One with thoughts about functions of existing climate related user interfaces written on it, and one with thoughts of different ways of illustrating air-temperature written on it. • Explanations of and reflections about functions of four different types of user interfaces for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. • Four product semantic analyses (PSA). Three of existing user interfaces for Swegon HVAC systems and one of a concept for a user interface for HVAC systems. • Interviews with six potential end users, written down to a large extent. • A compilation of the six interviews, written down in English. • An interview with an employee at Swegon service, regarding installation of user interfaces for HVAC systems, written down to a large extent. • A functional analysis, which in this project works as a requirements specification. • 10 ideas of concepts. • Two voting-systems which are developed for use when voting for several elements which can be combined to make up a holistic concept. The voting-systems are inspired by the "morphological analysis" described by Johannesson et al. (2009). • Two final concepts of user interfaces for HVAC systems with thorough descriptions in a table in this report. The concepts are developed with respect to end users and design principles. • Simplified versions of each of the two final concepts as CAD-models and as 3D-prints.