Guiding questions for increasing the generation of product ideas to meet changing needs (QuChaNe)

Abstract

One of the reasons why products are replaced is as a consequence of changes in the users’ personal life. Adaptable or upgradable products have the advantage that, to some extent, they counter dissatisfaction in products that still work by improving functionalities or adding new ones. So, to develop adaptable products, designers have to consider the potential changes in the users’ personal life during the earlier phases of the design process. This work presents a list of scenario creation-type questions which promote design ideas that consider changing needs (QuChaNe). To check the effectiveness of this list of questions, an experiment with 28 designers was conducted. In the experiment, the designers applied the proposed list of questions to generate ideas for products. The same task was carried out using no prescribed method as a control group for comparison purposes. The results show that the use of the list of scenario creation questions leads to the generation of more ideas for changing needs and with higher quality. This finding implies that designers could use these questions to generate ideas for changing needs as a previous task before applying design for adaptability (DFA) or upgradability (DFU) methods. This would ultimately lead to more adaptable products.