Supporting communication between product designers and engineering designers in the design process of branded products: a comparison of three approaches

Abstract

The successful implementation of brand values and emotional concepts into physical products is critical in the design process of branded products and can be problematic when multidisciplinary project teams come from different backgrounds. This paper argues that lack of communication between product designers and engineering designers causes additional process iterations to assure that the initially intended brand values and emotional responses are preserved in the final product. This paper investigates the use of Annotations, Word Mappings and Multiple-Domain Matrices as three potential approaches to support the communication between product designers and engineering designers. The results of an evaluation study show the level of acceptability of these approaches among product designers, engineering designers and academics depending on the purpose of its use, the familiarity of users with the representation and the stage of the design process.

Keywords::

• communication
• brand values
• Kansei Engineering

Acknowledgement

This research was conducted in the context of the SKIPPI project that is financed by French National Research Agency.