Business as Unusual: Designing products with consumers in the loop (original) (raw)
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Procedia CIRP, 2017
The customer as co-creator of products is a grand challenge the entire consumer products manufacturing industry is facing. The design, manufacture and delivery of mass personalised consumer products must not only meet customer preferences but must be produced economically and sustainably too. ReDistributed Manufacturing (RDM) has the potential to disrupt the way products are designed, produced and consumed products across their entire lifecycle and will allow the creation of disruptive business models and entirely new supply chain structures. New structures of design and manufacturing can enable large reductions in resource consumption by limiting waste in a supply chain (e.g. reducing transport distances) and through addressing the flows of resources at critical times in the lifecycle of products. It can also enable reduction of R&D waste by enabling a more targeted delivery of custom products to meet specific user needs and demands in different contexts and across extended timespans of the product lifecycle. Few manufacturers have started experimenting with open innovation to address the two manufacturing challenges of: (i) the ability to identify rapidly the needs and preferences of different market segments; (ii) the ability to respond quickly and flexibly to those. This paper demonstrates a model-based methodology and information technology to engage consumers at large scales to drive new product and manufacturing process development to address these challenges. An orange beverage has been selected to show that by linking a game-like consumer facing web application and a novel computer driven flow manufacturing system, target sensory attributes obtained by consumer groups can be rapidly translated into a new formulation recipe and its manufacturing process of a beverage that meets those needs and prototyped for that consumer group to evaluate. One can then envisage future scenarios where formulated consumer products are rapidly co-created and produced serving the needs of localised markets.
AS Journal of Computer Sciences , 2022
Design approaches have often been accused of failing to engage with users within the design process, with user engagement seen as a high-cost activity in terms of time, logistics, and financial investment. This has the potential to compromise commercial opportunity and to adversely affect products user experience. Here, a participatory design approach is applied, remotely, to an existing software product to identify the tangible benefits of adoption as reported by actual users. This acted as a valuable feedback mechanism to help the developers understand how they could further improve their service offering and provided the opportunity to form a data-driven approach to business case development for those wishing to purchase the product. The highly transferable, sustainable, low cost, and high impact approach will enhance the user experience and commercial potential of products and services, while assisting those wishing to build stronger business cases for product manufacture and adoption. As such, it will be of interest to product manufacturers, designers, and researchers, alike.
A New Consumerism: The Influence of Social Technologies on Product Design
de Vere, I. (2014) A New Consumerism: The Influence of Social Technologies on Product Design. Design Education & Human Technology Relations. The 16th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE2014), University of Twente, Netherlands, 2014
Social media has enabled a new style of consumerism. Consumers are no longer passive recipients; instead they are assuming active and participatory roles in product design and production, facilitated by interaction and collaboration in virtual communities. This new participatory culture is blurring the boundaries between the specific roles of designer, consumer and producer, creating entrepreneurial opportunities for designers, and empowering consumers to influence product strategies. Evolving designer-consumer interactions are enabling an enhanced model of co-production, through a value-adding social exchange that is driving changes in consumer behaviour and influencing both product strategies and design practice. The consumer is now a knowledgeable participant, or prosumer, who can contribute to user–centered research through crowd sourcing, collaborate and co-create through open-source or open-innovation platforms, assist creative endeavors by pledging venture capital through crowd funding and advocate the product in blogs and forums. Social media- enabled product implementation strategies working in conjunction with digital production technologies (e.g. additive manufacture), enable consumer-directed adaptive customisation, product personalisation, and self-production, with once passive consumers becoming product produsers. Not only is social media driving unprecedented consumer engagement and significant behavioural change, it is emerging as a major enabler of design entrepreneurship, creating new collaborative opportunities. Innovative processes in design practice are emerging, such as the provision of digital artifacts and customisable product frameworks, rather than standardised manufactured solutions. This paper examines the influence of social media-enabled product strategies on the methodology of the next generation of product designers, and discusses the need for an educational response.
Designing for DIY practice: users’ involvement in creative process for sustainable consumption
The research explores approaches for designers to help foster sustainable patterns of production and consumption (SPC), through the involvement of final users in the creative process of making artefacts she or he will use and consume. To the purpose, appealing and satisfactory –beyond sustainable– solutions have to be proposed to users. The strategy described in this paper attempts to generate a condition of “flow” [Csikszentmihalyi, 1990] through the practice of Do-It-Yourself (DIY). « DIY constitutes a significant but unexplored domain both of consumption and practice. [...and] Second, DIY is a field in which the relation between tool, materials and competence is plainly significant. As such it allows us to investigate the characteristics and qualities of specific combinations of skill and consumer goods » [Watson and Shove, 2006]. Building on these ideas I speculate on the potential for developing a Sustainable Product Service System (S-PSS) designed to allow bricoleurs, amateurs, professionals, prosumers ... to take part in self-designing/ producing/ repairing/ upgrading/ repurposing or re-interpreting (domestic) artefacts by themselves and in collaboration with the other members of the community.
Department of Industrial …, 2004
Generative tools and cultural probes are techniques for letting product users actively participate in the knowledge that designers and user researchers gather about the context of product use. Sanders has proposed that these techniques go beyond the classical user study techniques, which focus on either what people say (questionnaire and structured interview) or what they do (observation studies, ethnographic methods). In contrast, users participating in generative tools studies are asked to make artefacts expressing meanings about concrete aspects surrounding product use to abstract aspects of their life, hopes and dreams in general. By allowing people to create these artefacts, and then to explain them to a panel of peers, respondents take the initiative in determining the direction of the user study, thereby compensating for blind spots in the researcher or designer.
"Post-use design thinking is an approach for sustainability which enables a product to be reused in a new context after completing its initial use. People tend to re-use objects intuitively when they find the potential to re-contextualize them regardless of designer’s intention. If a designer proposes an object for re-use, she/he should also be aware of the local knowledge in terms of people’s needs, experiences and preferences related to post-use behaviours. Post-use design solutions would be well accepted and implemented if the user knowledge informs the early stages of product design and development process. This study aims to explore how the user observations inform the post-use dimensions and design solutions, and how that information is incorporated into the idea generation phase of the design process. To investigate this further, an undergraduate design project with an emphasis on post-use design thinking has been selected as the scope of this study. Keywords: sustainability, user observations, post-use, idea generation, product design and development process"
Towards sustainable use: An exploration of designing for behavioural change
2006
Welcome to DeSForM 006, the second DeSForM conference. Last time in 005 many of us met in the Baltic Flour Mills in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK, a building with a rich cultural heritage, a rich story to tell and essentially a driver of cultural change in the local contexts. Welcome also to the Evoluon Building, which we regard in the same light within the wider Eindhoven environs! A cultural icon. A Design Idea which communicates its own narrative, an expression of its cultural qualities, potential for human engagement and pragmatic function. It is instinctively read and interpreted by its participative community, which in-turn triggers desired cultural growth and change.
The product ecology: Understanding social product use and supporting design culture
2007
The field of interaction design has broadened its focus from issues surrounding one person interacting with one system to how systems are socially and culturally situated among groups of people. To understand the situations surrounding product use interaction design researchers have turned to qualitative, ethnographic research methods. However, stripped from underlying theory, these methods can be prescriptive at best.