The Smart Factory View (SMARTVIEW) project takes place within the factory of Famolde, a highly technological mid-cap producer of complex moulds in Portugal. The production environment experiences challenges in maintaining worker engagement and cross-discipline collaboration, leading to a silo mentality across Famolde’s departments. Engagement is a topic closely connected to employee voice (the feeling of being heard), employee recognition (the feeling of being seen) and senior leadership approachability (the feeling of being part of a team). Traditional tools to break down silos have not had the desired effects, hence the team is looking at new approaches to this topic via the Better Factory project. 

The SMARTVIEW project will develop and demonstrate a nature-inspired holistic interface for cross-factory cooperation. The artist Kristina Pulejkova will use VR and data analytics, sourced from interventions by the tech supplier Octavic, to build narratives around human-nature relationships in the context of the factory floor. In this way, the factory will be approached as an ecosystem, a natural environment inhabited by both humans and non-humans (machines), who engage in a complex grid of interactions and relationships, similar to a forest.