A MPCDM-enabled Product Concept Design via User Involvement Approach

This article reports how designers manipulate a collaborative and reliable process, which is more directly in contact with users and is different from the traditional design approach for interpreting and satisfying users' specific needs. The approach user involvement for product concept design is proposed, from a multi-professional design knowledge-handling viewpoint. It comprises three phases, namely, user needs elicitation and transformation, product definition diversification and design concept specification, which integrates the means end chain technique with systematic analysis and design technology to develop the multi-professional collaborative design model (MPCDM) for product concept design (PCD). Basically, this approach is a method of making design decisions via user involvement, that is, a strategy for transferring user preference into a specific product concept. A case study on designing an assistive eating device for patients with cervical cord injuries is used to illustrate the performance of the proposed prototype MPCDM-enabled PCD, which has demonstrated its effectiveness in user involvement issue and explained how designers are able to identify with a good degree of certainty attributes for creative product development, by collaboration with users via Internet.