AI for User-Centered New Product Development: From Large-Scale Need Elicitation to Generative Design

The motivation to utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) in New Product Development (NPD) stems from the growing abundance of user-generated data, such as online reviews and technological advances in computational methods for drawing useful design knowledge and insights from that data. As NPD is a knowledge and data-intensive effort, AI offers the ability to augment historically human-centered activities, just as AI is beginning to augment other human activities like highway driving (e.g., Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assist system). Current advances make AI very capable of prediction and comparison of attributes within large data sets. The potential applications for AI and NPD are broad, spanning from user needs identification to aiding engineers in generating new designs. For example, AI can improve the process of analyzing customer needs by the adoption of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Such services are already being applied in organizations throughout the industrial spectrum. In design, AI is being experimented with to generate new designs and improved solutions. For example, NASA has used generative design computer-aided software to make the structural elements of Mars rovers ...