A strategy for customer-oriented human-centric product conceptualization

Abstract

A functional-commercial analysis strategy (FCAS) is proposed to facilitate customer-oriented and human-centric product concept generation and selection. First, general sorting is utilized to elicit the initial product platform, which is then used to generate initial design options of a specific product. After that, designers contribute importance ratings on the functional-commercial criteria with regard to the design options, which are elicited using repertory grids. In order to make a trade-off between cost- and time-related concerns, these ratings are first employed to reduce the number of initially-acquired design options, and then used as the input features to the restricted coulomb energy (RCE) neural network. The RCE network is first used for classifying these design options into different patterns, i.e. cost-time-pair. The classification results can subsequently serve as the bases for the selection of the preferred design options. A case study on wood golf club design is conducted to demonstrate the proposed method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.