Stimulating creative design alternatives using customer values

This paper presents and illustrates an approach and procedures to stimulate the creation of design alternatives. The purpose is to generate many very good alternatives for a specific new product. Subsequently, a comparative evaluation of these alternatives and honing the designs of the most promising ones can proceed. To create potential alternatives with high customer appeal, the approach first elicits and organizes customer values to comprehensively define customer appeal. Several procedures are then defined and illustrated that use these customer values to stimulate the creation of alternative new product designs and design features. Applications concerning one tangible product, cellular telephones, and one intangible product, cellular telephone plans, illustrate the approach.