Testing the Usability of Guidelines for the Design of Surprising Products

DS 116: Proceedings of the DESIGN2022 17th International Design Conference

Year: 2022
Editor: Mario Štorga, Stanko Škec, Tomislav Martinec, Dorian Marjanović
Author: Omar Raafat, Niccol
Series: DESIGN
Institution: Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Section: Human Behaviour and Design Creativity
Page(s): 931-940
DOI number: https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2022.95
ISSN: 2732-527X (Online)

Abstract

The paper introduces guidelines to support designers to generate ideas for the development of surprising products. The guidelines are structured coherently with the concept of sensory incongruity and the Function-Behaviour-Structure framework to create a mismatch between previously conceived expectations and product features. The usability of the interactive presentation is checked with an experiment that involved more than 30 subjects with a background in product design (mechanical engineers and industrial designers), which demonstrated to be capable of generating ideas using the same.

Keywords: product design, idea generation, surprise, expectations, user-centred design