‘Design for X’ based on foreseeing emotional impact of meetings with evolving products

Abstract

Current Design for Emotion (DfE) approaches tend to focus on meetings between a product and a user during the use phase. The research reported in this paper presents work carried out investigating emotions arising from meetings taking place between a product evolving across different life-phases and different stakeholders involved, particularly during product development. By explicitly focusing on the product evolution taking place across time, this research has established that emotions are also affected by the factory built environment, manufacturing processes employed and the concerns of multiple individuals involved. This paper also provides evidence that these multi-stakeholder emotions have the capacity to influence their performance, which in turn affects product development metrics such as cost, time and quality. This result has been used to develop a novel DfX approach that has been implemented in a prototype computational tool. A novelty of the developed DfX approach is that it considers product development consequences to be composed of two components, direct (D) and emotional (E) consequences. The evaluation results collectively indicate that this research has contributed an improved DfX approach that provides designers with a broader view of the impact of their decisions on a range of stakeholders besides product users.