Dataset of spontaneous design examples from industrial shopfloors

<p><strong>Background and motivation</strong></p><p>There is a common association of industrial work at shopfloor level with jobs that are repetitive, devoid of creativity and of leeway to make changes to the job itself, the products or the equipment. In a project funded by the <i>Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology</i>, entitled <i>Craft - Spontaneous design in shopfloors as a source for inclusive design</i>, we documented examples of shopfloor industrial workers' inventiveness, which counteracts these preconceptions.</p><p>This dataset contains 696 photographs of spontaneous design examples, i.e. designs made by non-designers, created by industrial workers. The photographs in the dataset were collected in eight industrial units in Portugal in the sectors of ceramics, textiles, metallurgy, packaging, and injection moulding, and they document examples of artifacts created by industrial shopfloor workers to improve ergonomics, processes and product quality.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>About how the dataset is organised</strong></p><p>Each picture has metadata on the country where the photograph was taken, a description of the worker's intervention and/or purpose of the resulting artifact, alternative text, copyright status, and keywords categorising the industrial sector, as well as the type of spontaneous design. For the latter, we have used Madeleine Akrich's categories of displacement, adaptation, extension, and detour (Akrich, 1998).</p><p>Each folder in the dataset is an industrial unit. Photograph naming standard is as follows: <i>yyyymmdd_CompanyCode_##.png</i> or <i>yyyymmdd_CompanyCode_P##_##.png.</i> The latter is for photographs in which a worker (P##) has been identified as a creator of that spontaneous design example and has interacted with the researchers collecting the data. Therefore, we can group each worker's spontaneous designs.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Reference:&nbsp;</strong></p><p>Akrich M (1998). Les utilisateurs, acteurs de l'innovation. Éducation permanente, Paris: Documentation française, 79–90</p>