Goals

As the project is UX driven, its goal is to place the user at the centre of the innovation. We will create the body of knowledge necessary to establish a UX Centre of Excellence that we will systematically involve in our innovation projects as well as a service to our clients. The acquisition of this new knowledge will improve the renewal and expansion of the range of products and services.

Specifically, the overall of the UXDI project is a wealth of new knowledge containing:

• An in-house UX Capability and Maturity Model that addresses the complexity of innovation project planning and execution activities in industrial companies,

• A new method for assessing the perceived value that UX brings to the company (UX culture),

• A toolbox that will instrument and automate the application of the models and methods developed in the project, including a training platform.

This body of knowledge will serve as the scientific foundation for the activities of the future UXCE that Aisin will operate.

Methodology

The scientific operational foundations of the future UX Centre of Excellence are a Capability Maturity Model appropriate to industrial processes and in particular to innovation processes in the mobility and logistics sector and a set of validated tools allowing the implementation of UX models and methods by ensuring the efficiency of the teams, the quality (reproducibility) of the services as well as the economic validation for the management.

How will UX be integrated?

• UX activities will be integrated to co-create value with agile software development,

• We will exploit user research findings to create new innovation opportunities.

• The UXDI approach is radically new:

  • Existing research in the field is mainly academic, not in line with the requirements of large-scale industrial projects and not specifically adapted to the sustainable mobility and logistics sectors,

  • The toolbox that will be developed has no equivalent to date, neither in the academic nor in the industrial world.

The very first step of the project is the conduction of two systematic literature reviews to determine what are the state of the art about methodology and potential existing toolbox to convert UX data into agile way of working but also a new method to assess the perceived value that UX activities brings to the company.

At the end, the final goal of the project is to set up and operate a UX Centre of Excellence (UXCE) that will carry out UX-as-a-Service assignments for innovation projects in the sustainable mobility and logistics sectors.

Stakeholders

The UXDI project as a founding part of the UX Centre of Excellence based in Braine l'Alleud and at A6K in Charleroi will carry out missions for the entire Aisin group (global scope), but also for external clients in the ecosystem created in the Walloon Region around Aisin Technical Centre Europe (Aisin TCE). This project and the UXCE will exploit and further develop the applications of the simulator set up by Aisin TCE at A6K as part of the VIADUCT project. This project will also give Aisin the opportunity to strengthen its collaboration with UCLouvain.

This project is made possible by the financial support of the Walloon Region. In the very long term, the UXDI and UXCE will be dedicated to every stakeholder that is interested in sustainable mobility and sustainable development and may need technical support and expertise in the development of solutions.

Location

The main location of the project is the European headquarter of Aisin at Braine l’Alleud near Brussels in Belgium. The team will also be active at A6K in Charleroi and collaborate with the Media Innovation & Intelligibility Lab (MiiL) of the UCLouvain. This project is fully managed by the European hub of Aisin and supported by researchers from UCLouvain entities bringing their expertise to supply the project and its development.

Duration

This project intends to be conducted from the 1st of April 2022 to the 31st of March 2025. The official kick-off of the project was on the 13th of July 2022 after an Extended Reality (XR) demo at the MiiL in UCLouvain buildings followed by a roundtable session of the members of the project.