Graphical User Interface for a papermill control room, Umeå Institute of Design, 9 weeks in 2009

This project was a collaboration with Pöyry, a global engineering and consultancy company and a papermill in Sundsvall, south of Umeå.
The given task in this project was to design a new graphical user interface for a new fiber analyzing- system that Pöyry was going to install one of their papermills.
The fiber analyzer updated important parameters every 20th second. The most important parameters was fiber length, freeness, bonding and energy efficiency. It is getting hard to monitor more than five parameters at the same time.

The final Graphical User Interface. The dotted gray circle works as atemplate. It shows the optimal level of all four parameters. Green color means stable level of the parameter, yellow color means acceptable but the parameter is going towards a critical evel and red means that the level is critical.
One blinking circle means unchanged level. The amount of circles means how fast the trend of each parameter is changing. The graph is updating every 20th second, that is the time span that the fiber analyser controls the quality of the pulp.

We got a guided tour through the factory area to learn a little bit about the different processes. It was interesting but not really relevant for what we were going to design. However, it became more relevant when we entered the control room to see how they monitored the process.

Analysing the data that we observed in the control room.






Initial sketches.

I created five basic concepts and published them on my previous website. Then I asked friends and people that was close to answer an questionnaire related to the five ideas.

Inspiration images.

 

The final Graphical User Interface. The dotted gray circle works as atemplate. It shows the optimal level of all four parameters. Green color means stable levell of the parameter, yelloy color means acceptable but the parameter is going towards a critical evel and red means that the level is critical.
One blinking circle means unchanged level. The amount of circles means how fast the trend of each parameter is changing. The graph is updating every 20th second, that is the time span that the fiber analyser controls the quality of the pulp.