Abstract

With pressure from the competitive market and more selective buyers, consumer product design shifts the focus ever closer to users. Using concrete stories about product or technology use, henceforth referred to as ‘scenarios’, have all the potentials to bridge an understanding within a design team and between a design team and stakeholders. However compared with domains that have more mature history with design scenarios such as information technology and human-computer interaction, the adoption of scenarios in product design is in need of a more solid framework. Additionally, when it comes to introducing a scenario-focused practice in profit-oriented organizations (i.e. design companies), the new scenario-based design approach is challenged to be more reliable, time-saving and gratifying than the currently used design approaches. This paper proposes a framework for building and using scenarios that considers the practice of product designers. We ground our research on the design practice as well as literature to explore the possibilities of scenario-based design in answering the challenges faced by product designers. The framework aims to support designers in structuring their design knowledge, confirming their rationales and communicating their ideas. We hope to contribute knowledge to the domain of scenario-based design as well as a tool that guides designers in applying a scenario-based practice.