Process tailored to the new Design Challenges and Opportunities

Design is largely considered to be everything from a beautiful form to an innovative consumer product. What certainly differs an artefact from the designed product is that a product is created for the mass-cultures and mass-production and its development requires choosing of a precise methods organized in a specific design process. The complexity of design today lies in handling not only the creativity and industry but also rapid scientific and technological development and new social challenges. All these factors modified the users’ culture and expectation that they have from products. In order to adopt the design discipline and a designer as a professional to the new social and industrial contexts, challenges and demands for creating meaningful products and solutions, there is a necessity to tailor the design processes based on known principles of design thinking starting from the designer’s “know-how” and empathy, in the sense of individual or group creativity and arriving to the rationality related to the present user’s and market’s needs from the one side and a manufacturing industry and technology development from the other side, but also consider the opportunities coming from the new technologies and additive manufacturing. Generally, we are considering here the investigation of how design discipline, and by this design process, is changing with implementation of innovative technology and methods and tools for prototyping (i.e. additive manufacturing) for different typologies of products and design scenarios. In specific, authors want to demonstrate not only the design process based on continuous evaluation of a product but also facilitation of decision making process for designers related to choosing the appropriate design solution. Here we propose exploration of introduction of working models for simulation purpose that help users and designers not only evaluate the final results but perceive technical and qualitative characteristics of the object during the all design process - from idea generation to the final product development. The purpose of implementation of this kind of repetitive approach since early stages of the project is in detecting errors relative to the aspects of products’ functioning, understanding of feasibility and quality of interaction between the user and the product.