Dear All
I am working with 3rd Year Industrial Design students on creativity
methods in the design process. We are particularly focussing upon
the design of service experiences, but new product development is not
excluded.
I am looking for methods and assistance to help students with the
development of concepts. The early stages of product and service
development are well described, so are the later phases, yet the
concept phase is elusive.
Concepts are clearly different from ideas. But how? How can
students explore the solution space for concepts? How do ideas
suddenly merge to become concepts and are there methods to assist
this? How can concepts be structured and filtered? How do we
evaluate concepts?
Generally I see that students are good at generating masses of
ideas. They are also good at visualising concepts, but they are
messy when it comes to explaining the process of moving from one to
the other. My industrial experience also shows that this is a messy
and 'magic' process. Even large design consultancies admit to hiding
this from clients because of its messy and highly subjective basis.
Can anybody recommend some literature that can help students
structure the concept phase of service and product development? Im
happy if the literature also concludes that the process is messy,
individual and based upon experience and gut feeling. However, a
process stage that defines about 80% of project costs must have been
thoroughly studied by someone?
Regards
SimonC
Simon Clatworthy
Professor of Interaction Design
Institute for Design
Tel: +47 22 99 71 41
Mob: +47 911 42 337
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