Designing the delivery of the future – An example of Vision in Product Design (ViP) being used
In a previous post I talked about the Vision in Product Design approach, explaining what it was about and the benefits of it.
Since then, I’ve been applying it in a couple of projects I’m currently working on, and I found that the trickiest thing of this approach is to know exactly what it is that you are looking for with it and how to keep in track. So in this train of thought, I figured that it would be interesting and helpful for people not familiarized with ViP to go through each of the phases of the approach while having a concrete example of what should be done and what kind of results to expect from each phase of the design process.
So as an example, I’ll be using the process that me and my team have gone trough during our Integral Design Project, which is a second year master’s course at the TU Delft involving team members from the 3 master directions (Strategic product design, Design for Interacion and Integral Product Design) working together on a project.
In our case, our goal was to develop a new, more sustainable product for a producer of truck coachworks (known in Dutch as Combi’s), focusing on their current products for “delivery and distribution”.
So, asuming you read the previous post and are already a bit familiarized with the methodology, let’s cut to the chase…
PART 1:
DECONSTRUCTION – THE PRODUCT LEVEL
The first step of deconstruction phase of the ViP process is analysis at the product level. The analysis was done by finding all underlying factors that result in the product (Lloyd, Hekker, & van Dijk, 2006). We began the process by first understanding all the quantitative and qualitative value of the product itself (Combi 2000 & Combi 3000). The later process is about understanding why are the products the way they are? : where the inspiration of the product might come from? How has it evolved to be like this? and what is the intended and unintended design qualities of the product?
Remember that ViP is all about looking, reflecting, and understanding the existing products from
distant perspective.
Step 1: Analysing Product Value: Quantitative & Qualitative Analysis
According to Burgess and Jackson [1], there are two ways a product can be valued: extrinsically and intrinsically. Extrinsic Value is quantative and often referred to as “instrumental” value (Burgess & Jackson, 2006). Extrinsic value is all about technical specifications that the existing products have such as dimension, material specifications, features, etc. Qualitative Value is about intangible value attributed to the products that can give added value to the product such as: Reliability; Fexibility; Safety, etc.
According to the graphic above, the qualitative values of the Combi products can be categorized into several aspects in which some features that can strengthen the value. Some of those features already exist and are already good (++), some features exist but should be improved (+) and some other features do not exist yet (-) and could be added in the future product concept.
Step2 : Why are the products the way they are ?
On the table below, the results from our brain-storming session can be seen, in which we asked ourselves the question: “why are the products we are dealing with the way they are?”
Step 3: Intended and unintended design qualities.
The figure below shows the result from the brainstorming session about how the product looks and which qualities can be categorized as intended and unintended design qualities. According to Lloyd, Hekker, & van Dijk (2006), Intended design qualities are the design qualities that are intended that way by the designer. Unintended design qualities are those qualities that were not intended but become the result of subjective projection by other people.
[1] Keith Burgess & Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. , “Intrinsic Value” (www.analphilosopher.com)
So… that was part 1 of the implementation example. In future posts I will continue explaining the next steps of the ViP process.
