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This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype 'A remote operator's day in a future control center in 2025' was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research, which was based on explicit ambient user experience goals in the nominated industrial work context. This article describes the complete creative prototyping process, starting from the initial user research that included evaluations of current work practices, technological trend studies and co-design workshops, and concluding with user research that assessed the final design outcome, the science fiction prototype. The main contribution of the article is on the ambient user experience goals, the creation process of the video-illustrated science fiction prototype, and on the reflection of how the experience-driven prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with expert process control workers. For the science fiction prototyping process, the contribution demonstrates how the method may employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented user experience research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used to validate the results.

This paper introduces a video-illustrated science fiction prototype "Remote operator's day in a future control center in 2025" aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and smart automation for the future factories of Industry 4.0. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research in an industrial work context based on explicit user experience (UX) goals. This paper firstly describes how the nominated UX goals were implemented in a video-illustrated science fiction prototype and, secondly, how the prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with process control workers. The main contribution is to demonstrate how the science fiction prototyping method can employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented UX research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used for validating UX goals by means of a science fiction prototype.

Although process control rooms are advanced digital environments with a multitude of desktop and large displays, there still exists a gap between the interaction technologies being employed in pervasive displays used in other settings and those used in control rooms. Previous research on large displays is extensively geared towards investigating social interaction in non-serious environments. The potential of employing multimodal interactive displays to support work and collaboration in process control rooms is underexplored. This paper explores modern control rooms as interactive collaborative environments and presents a multimodal prototype that promotes the users' freedom and flexibility of work through gestural and spoken interaction. The design of the prototype was informed by three feedback sessions and two user studies with various stakeholders. Our findings indicate multimodal interaction in process control rooms should (a) support the feeling of control and safety during the interaction, (b) enable efficient access to information provided by system from a distance, and (c) provide freedom and flexibility of use anywhere in the control room.