AN EXPLORATIVE APPROACH TO MASTER THESIS DEVELOPMENT: DESIGN DRIVEN INNOVATION THROUGH MODE OF USE LEVER AND PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

This paper goes over an explorative approach used at the Design School of Politecnico di Milano in the Design& Engineering Master Course for the development of students’ final thesis. Design Engineering MC is an inter-faculty course where teachers coming from both engineering and design fields work together in order to make students aware of the different skills that play the principal roles in a design product development. In the master thesis students have to put down into practice the knowledge they acquired during the master course. They are asked to design a new radical innovative product following an entire design process from design brief definition till product development. During the master course students develop several projects answering a brief given by the teachers while during the thesis they have to follow the process below: • Identify an interesting research field • Analyse the field through benchmarking • Identify strength and weakness of existing products • Figure out if there is a potentiality for a new product • Define their own brief describing needs and requirements. • Design a new product. The objective is to understand the market, the environment, the user and generate a new product through a design driven innovation. Design-driven innovation can have three possible levers, meaning three possible starting points of the creative process; these levers are: Form, Mode of Use and Technology. This paper describes an innovative project developed according to a design process focused mostly on the mode of use lever: a motorcycle back protector. In these kind of products the mode of use and the way the user interact with the product play a really important role so the students started the design process considering the mode of use of the product, in order to define the non-satisfied needs that could