بررسي روش هاي شكل گيري ايده بر مبناي طراحي كار بر محور

Investigation of Idea Generation Methods Based on Empathic Design

The goal of this article is to look for alternative methods in comparison to what is called Functional based methods of Idea generation in Industrial Design. While the Functional based methods are referred as Form-giving or Gestalt based methods , which have their origin in Continental Philosophy, terms such as Empathic design, Contextual design and Affordance based design are related to more Empirical and Piercian tradition of Semiotics, which are mostly considered as Anglo-Saxon School of thought and design. To achieve the goal of comparing the benefits and values of alternative methods for functional based design, Empathic design is going to be explored and tested through an experimented case study for Idea generation in Industrial Design. In this paper, first the key terms of alternative terminology in comparison to functional Design would be introduced. It would be discussed what the difference between Gestalt and Affordance is. Activity theory would be also discussed as a term which has itʹs origin in Vygotskyʹs school of thoyght and emphasizes the role of culture and context. The main aim of introducing these terms is to show how and in which way concepts of context and culture interact with the current world concepts. Later a framework is going to be constructed between Gestalt, Affordance, Empathic Design and Activity theory. Afterwards a procedure based on Empathic design would be discussed and opened up step by step. The proposed procedure starts from creating a brainstorming session where users draw their ideas through a mind map and scenarios would be generated, then prototypes would be created based on those storyboards and the reaction of the users in using those prototypes would be also tested through it. These are situations which let us capture usersʹ tacit emotional knowledge. As conclusion, we propose comparable results to evaluate the benefits given from Empathic based design methods. It would be discussed that while Functional based methods would just stop on behavior-typical attributes of product , alternative Methods such as Empathic based design would open up more space to find invariant but hidden messages existing in the potential product, which are called affordances. In order to grasp affor-dances, scenarios and user intervention are key clues which can help us detect these levels of information. In comparison to Functional based methods, which the user interacts with the finished product only for validating the idea performed by designer; here in empathic based design the user is involved in the procedure of creating the product, and the resultant testable prototype would be generated twice during the design procedure. While first round prototypes work with the level of emotions, second round prototypes work with the level of culture and behavioral aspects. Since for a user centered design, the product should be considered as a whole, therefore these methods could help us open more space to view the totality of product space. It would be up to the reader to explore the values which exist in these alternative methods. The value of the procedure is a further research.