• Archives of design research
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.73-82
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• 2003

This paper presents a case study of designing the stroller and its renting system for department stores in order to verify the feasibility of the participatory design approach, in particular the concept generation toolkits and the participatory design workshops, in the product development process. As the concept generation toolkits to draw active user participation, a Velcro Covered stroller model and a Block Layout System were developed and used in a series of the participatory design workshops. The results suggest that the participatory design approach provides better understanding of what the users want and allows designers to avoid false expectation about the design context. It was also found that the experience of design team with the users in the workshop was a good source of design ideation. The study also suggests that participatory design approach can become more effective by developing the concept generation toolkits which are more appropriate for design problems and the methods to smoothly transform the concepts from users into synthesized design solutions.

• Archives of design research
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.119-128
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• 2004

There is a lack of user centered design methods that support effective collaboration between designers and end-users for designing hardware and software integrated digital products. This paper presents the application of Collaborative Design and a new collaborative design prototyping tool for interactive digital product design projects. The tool consists of STCtools(State Transition Chart tools) software, hardware modeling materials, and physical interface toolkits for integrating software and hardware. STCtools allow users to create and edit States, to compose Events describing transitions between States, and to run intermediate or final results of STC. Using the hardware modeling materials and the physical interface toolkit, designers and end-users can collaborately examine the hardware and software integrated concepts in an early stage of the design process. Three collaborative design workshops of designing a portable digital guide for a theme park were accomplished to examine the feasibility of the tool. The results suggested that the tool supported iterative concept development and interactions between designers and end users. Although several user interface problems of STCtools were identified, the participants gave positive feedback on the role of the tool in collaborative concept generation and deployment. It is expected that the results of this study contribute not only to the collaboration between designers and end users, but also to the collaboration between designers, and between designers and other professionals.