Chapter2.4 described various customer involvement methods used in different sce-narios of product development. Referring to different levels of customer involvement (in terms of this thesis, customers are beneficiaries), the reviewed methods presented three levels: design for, design with and design by. Design for describes the perspec-tive of product development to create a product for a specified target group, without participation of real persons, representing the target group. Here, designers create the product and decide about changes all by themselves. In design with representa-tives of the target group participate in the design process e.g. within evaluation, but the designer is still creating the product. Design by moves this responsibility to the target group entirely.
The method, as presented in this thesis, refers to the inclusion of guidelines into the design process without the involvement of real customers (beneficiaries) into the product development process. The involvement of the target group is handled by context information based on user studies. Also a specification for only one target group or a combination of different groups is possible.
Figure 4.14: Impact on different methods of involvement
Figure4.14describes all previously mentioned methods of end user involvement in relation to product development phases. The impact field represents affected phases of the product development process. Referring to the theses of this work (see section1.6), it is aimed to include the presented tools intoproduct development process phases without an obstruction to the designer. In the first phase (draft) the user is able to use a stand alone system to get recommendations for the desired tar-get group and product type. These textual suggestions for the design process refer to different aspects of the product which are already specified during drafting. For instance if the product should be for visual impaired people, the designer should be aware of large fonts as soon as possible in the product development process. Some recommendations which should be considered, do have a very strong geometrical
form and surface impact so already in this phase the designer must be aware of dif-ferent aspects of the end users.
The second tool can be used within daily-work software of designers as an inte-grated module of the CAD software Siemens NX. This results in acceptance by the users getting qualitative, but also quantitative recommendations directly applied to product parameters.
All tools create a user awareness with the designers for a proper understanding of impaired userβs needs. Product development is no longer an encapsulated pro-cess (see 2.1) in which not only the surface of a product and its functional design aspects are considered but also context of the focus group, typical environments, tasks and component specifications. The method provides user involvement by using existing user studies with specified target groups. Also the context information is used through the completeproduct development processto support designers in the sketch design and CAD phase.
Referring to section2.4, the software framework can be seen as an extension to Quality Function Deployment by an iterative factor. In addition to QFD in each phase the scenario is specified and used to generate quality function similar recom-mendations based upon predefined specifications.
4.4 Conclusion
Based on the implementation of the knowledge base in the previous chapter 3, this chapter presents the implementation of the framework providing a support for de-signers by providing recommendations based on a pre-specified set of target User Models, typical environments and typical tasks which can be performed using the product.
A system architecture including designer front ends was presented and tools im-plemented for the purpose of a phase based supporting framework providing design-ers with qualitative and quantitative recommendations as seen in chapter3.3.6.
Hypothesis 2 (Suitable Reasoning)
Ontologybased models can be used to give statements from knowledge base for specified scenarios described by the questions of who is using a product where to perform what task.
The result presents the answer to hypothesis 2 as a standalone tool presenting qualitative recommendations for sketch design phase and an integrated module in a CAD environment (Siemens NX), which can also apply recommendations directly to existing virtual objects. A server provides recommendations based on ontology based models and reasoning as seen in chapter3.
With respect to section2.4, the framework can be seen as an extension to Quality Function Deployment by an iterative factor allowing designers to modify product de-signs based upon predefined scenario specifications.
Chapter 5 will evaluate the presented framework by the impact on the product development processwith involvement of designers and beneficiaries.
Evaluation
This chapter concerns the third hypothesis of chapter 1.6. For a reasonable and comprehensible evaluation, this hypothesis was split into three sub-hypotheses. The first sub-hypothesis concentrates on the account of the general concept of the frame-work and includes interviews with designers. The second focuses upon the improve-ment for the complete developimprove-ment process and was impleimprove-mented including an on-line questionnaire with end users of the framework and the third targets end users of the products (customer satisfaction), so ππππ products were tested with beneficiaries.
While section5.1concerns the theoretical concept of the system, section5.2focuses on the use of the software by designers. Section5.3concentrates on the view by real people of the target group directly to see if the products can be used by a wider group of people.