Modelling (pre-)Design Activities With a Multi-Stakeholder Perspective - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 166

focus: from the one hand the representation of needs and their translation into a
design specification, from the other hand the representation of the different stake-
holders influencing the adoption process. The model is illustrated and discussed
with a simple example aiming at clarifying its features and potentialities.
12.2 Building the Specification of a New Product
As introduced above, the identification and the fulfilment of customers' needs
represent a critical issue for designing and developing successful products. The
stream of research dedicated to user-centred design has dedicated major efforts to
understand customer needs through the establishment of a closer relationship
between designers and users. In most cases, needs identification is triggered by
marketing inputs, and achieved through the observation of customer's behaviour so
as to elicit the so-called Voice-of-the-Customer. Indeed, this approach proves to be
very effective in order to improve existing products, but turns out to be quite limited
when radical innovation is searched. In fact, it is largely recognized that “customers
don't know what they want in the future” (Eisingerich et al. 2010 ) , although
competition demands companies to be “the first to give it to them”. Therefore,
despite its intrinsic limitations, the involvement of users in the design process has
been growing for two decades since its first theorization (von Hippel 1986 ), and still
it is an important trend in design (Borgianni et al. 2013 ) . The currently most
debated topics in this domain span from the proposition of practical tools to
individuate seeded needs (Ward 2009 ) to the correlation of the emerging needs
with the design specification (Ericson et al. 2009 ).
Nevertheless, two main limitations appear, one related to the object of study, the
other to the means to conduct the study itself, as further discussed in the following
two subsections. First, the user is not necessarily the most important actor influenc-
ing the purchase decision, and in most cases, he is not the only one. Second, while
design research has matured appropriate means to study in detail the cognitive
processes occurring in the design process once that the requirements are explicitly
defined, no reference models exist to investigate with equivalent rigour the previous
phases of product development.
12.2.1 A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective for Design
As anticipated before, in most instances, the innovation process is considerably
more complicated than simply making sure that a single user/buyer and a seller will
find mutual benefit from a transaction, so that the former will buy the product from
the latter. In fact, after the purchasing decision, the product must be actually put to
use (i.e., adopted) in order to deliver its benefits, and this process may also
necessitate an investment of time and effort to learn how to use it, to set it up, etc.