Testing the Usability of Guidelines for the Design of Surprising Products

The paper introduces guidelines to support designers to generate ideas for the development of surprising products. The guidelines are structured coherently with the concept of sensory incongruity and the Function-Behaviour-Structure framework to create a mismatch between previously conceived expectations and product features. The usability of the interactive presentation is checked with an experiment that involved more than 30 subjects with a background in product design (mechanical engineers and industrial designers), which demonstrated to be capable of generating ideas using the same.