BACKGROUND

Pöyry which is the collaborating industry partner in this project is a global expert in consulting and engineering.

In this project, a new fiber analyzer is available. This gives an opportunity to achieve large amounts of relevant quality date of the pulp every 20 seconds without testing the quality in a lab. This requires skilled operators but also tools to help them to sort out the crucial and relevant information to make it possible for the operator to run the process energy efficient and producing pulp with right quality.

INTERVIEW

By being guided around the paper factory and interviewing some operators, I got an overview of their working and the operator control interfaces in use.

Therefore, I have learned some important fact that it is a complicated work to find out problems from tons variable values. The quality result depends on the experience of the operator who has to be trained around 3 years.

RESEARCH

Due to the complexity of operator control system, my ambition for this project is to find a solution of data visualization which is not a replacement for existing control interfaces. It works like a screen saver which visualize the date to operator. The specific challenges of the concept are as follows:
a)    Find new advisable ways of visualizing the information to the operator so more information with trends or sometimes just singles values can be presented at the same time.
b)    How can distributions and uniformity be illustrated in time?
c)    How can operator get an instant overview and at the same time valuable information about the past?

In general, the challenge is to make the signal clear and intuitive.

Meanwhile, I started to read some articles in this area to know more about data visualization. Our class had also created a blog for sharing stuffs we found that collect to this project. Meanwhile, we had done user studies analysis, task analysis and mapped design opportunities together. I sorted out interesting points as follows:

During the research phase, I have stumbled upon a topic about “Performance Versus Preference”. At the end, I thought the final concept would not be too far away from the preference one. As I know, they felt comfortable about the existence interface. Thus, my research focused on Interpretation. For example, it make sense to define right direction as future, to define up direction means value increasing. So, the graphic would not be a problem for understanding even without any introduction.

CONCEPT

In this project, some properties measured or calculated in the analyzer are more important for the operator to constant oversee. They are
– Binding (reflected by the Tensile Index)
– Fiber length (reflected by Average Fiber Length and Tear Index)
– Energy Efficiency
So it would be good to see/monitor these three parameters at the same time at the first level. I put the other parameters at the background without taking too much attention.

There is an illustration on the left to show the concept.

INITIAL INTERFACE

Inspired by the water level, this concept uses a line instead of the whole production pipe line and several circles moving up and down to visualize value changes.

Depending how many production steps you have, the line is divided into equal slices.  If all the values of parameters are ideal, there is a straight line without any bulges. When one or more of them are changing too much, the circle will jump out and move. The color and size of the circle would also change according to the values.

PROTOTYPING

In this project, I used Processing to make prototypes reading the real values form the data base to test my concept. 
Here is the XLS data and processing file you can download.

FINAL PROPOSAL

In order to avoid  information overload (anxious) and underload (boring), operator can choose different levels of visualization on the left panel according to the situation. The main parameters of the paper quality  reveal on the right.

Operator can check the setting of this parameter to get more detailed information by moving his mouse on the circle. Computer has a data analyze program to show the relationship between different setting and parameters that could be a help system for beginner to find out the problems even without any experience. Meanwhile, the system highlights the relevant machines which affect the quality of the fiber or paper.

For example, if one refiner machine has been highlighted many times in a short period, the operator should go to the factory to check the physical machine probably.