Abstract:

The development of new design products encompasses many phases where diverse actors interact, as design products depend on the integration of heterogeneous competencies. Therefore, a monodisciplinary effort is not enough for the design and development of new products, it is the combination of diverse stakeholders’ know-how that enables the process. Although the interaction between multidisciplinary know-how for new product development is a widely discussed topic in several fields of Design research, we find that the Design discipline is in a pivotal moment for reframing and expanding its intervention within the topic for product design.

Traditionally, multi-actor participation throughout the new process is described by the research within the participatory design field, where co-design initiatives support the combination of diverse expertise for new design outputs. Over the years, the space for co-designing new products started at the team level, and today it widens interventions by engaging entire organizations and communities.

Although co-design is a great support for designers and product companies when understanding users’ needs and behaviors, technological evolution is challenging the definition of what the user requires. If on one hand, the users do not know the consequences of technological application on new potential products, on the other, design teams lack adequate know-how about technological possibilities. What are the properties of new computational technologies that could support the process of new product design and development?

Aiming at informing interested designers and professionals, this work develops a preliminary framework as a descriptive means to encourage the adoption of an organizational approach. Since the know-how for finding applications of new technologies is highly fragmented and specialized, an organizational approach that integrates diverse and dispersed know-how is recently being acknowledged as a valid enabler to advance in several sectors. For instance, manufacturing in the industry is shifting from defining dominant design to designing industry platforms as the contemporary strategy for winning product competition. In design, a similar approach could be supportive for combining useful know-how to design and develop new products. This becomes more and more relevant as complex issues extend beyond the product realm and require preliminary organization of competencies before the co-design phase can start (e.g. climate change, diversity & inclusion).

Specifically, this work takes into account the metadesign framework, particularly its infrastructural practice, described in the design literature starting from the beginning of the 2000s. This work updates the discussion by integrating into the framework the property of complex adaptive systems, which are currently informing organizational aspects of new product development in manufacturing, and expands the discussion by framing guidelines that could support product design under this perspective.

Keywords:

Technology shift, product design, metadesign, infrastructural practice, complex adaptive systems, knowledge combination.