Making use of scenarios : supporting scenario use in product design

The discipline of Scenario-Based Product Design (SBPD) guides the use of scenarios in a product design process. As concrete narratives, scenarios could facilitate making explicit how users would use the designed product in their activities, allowing usability studies to be an integrated part of the design process early on and not as a detached post-design testing. The early framework for scenario use was in the design of computer applications with the rise of Information Technology in the 1980s. The later works are often tailored to each new domain, even to some extent to each specific case, making the developed approaches not directly applicable to other domains. Within the context of consumer product design, the prior work is incomplete in that it has not fully addressed the particular characteristics of this domain. This thesis complements the understanding on SBPD from the theoretical perspective with an application of this knowledge to support the practice of product design. Through collaboration with industry, a tool is developed to provide a practical guidance for applying SBPD in design practice. The contribution of this research is a practice-based approach to create, use and manage scenarios in a product design process. The effort to create and maintain scenarios is considered justified as long as the scenario use is sustainable, and there is good interfacing with other activities in the design process. Future work could use the tool design and the recommendations provided in this thesis as the basis for making the support tool available to the design industry at large.