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Seeking Insights into an unknown Future: Exploring Designers’ Strategies to Discover Key Insights

Part of: User-Centred Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Line Sand Knudsen  and
Louise Møller Haase

Abstract

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Insights play a significant role in creation of new products. Insights provide the designer with an understanding of the user, market, technologies and trends, and how these might change over time. This information is critical for the designer to get an understanding of how and why present products succeed or fail. Hence, insights serve as both triggers and drivers for envisioning future products, but they are also fundamental to ensure that new products created will provide meaningful experiences to the users. In design literature, there is a significant amount of research on how to gather information about the user, market, trends, etc. However, very little research is focused on how the designer addresses this information to discover or uncover key insights. Through interviews with expert designers behind twelve products, we identified three strategies that designers use to discover insights. We found that designers search for insights that could be used to: 1) establish the product's future identity, 2) identify core challenges based on the new identity in the existing user experience and 3) identify solutions that could meet the core challenges and accentuate the new identity.

Keywords

Design insightsEarly design phasesDesign practiceNew product development
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 3999 - 4008
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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