Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or the improvement in them (Schumpter, 1983). Innovation is closely related to invention as innovation is more on involving the practical implementation of a new or improved invention to make a meaningful impact in a market or society (Schumpter, 1939). On the other hand, innovative design is a process of identifying, pinpointing, and understanding the needs of the user or audience (Shaulis, 2021). Previously, Dixon (1966) defined innovative design as any design that is: new or different, or elegant or uses new ideas, or is an improvement over its peers. Once the market need has been identified, a solution can then be designed. In our proposed innovative design method, we introduced and investigated a method that is able to be applied in designing an intergrated system that could be a valuable solution to the society. This method starts with directly observe activities of things and real people in real trouble in the real field. Then, we think about the value of "I wish there were such things as…", visualize the story, draw a clear sketch to accomplish the story concretely. Next, we solidify the functions and specifications while investigating needs and competition. Then, we create a prototype that able to show and test your ideas, demonstrate to the people who need it, let them experience it, and gain feedback. Lastly, we evaluate the value of product design and development and plan methods for implementing it as an organization, and plan ways to improve and expand globally. All of the steps in this method are important for innovative design, however, in this research this time we focused on co-designing value, big idea, and considering as integrated steps for identifying latent needs of the consumers. It is because identifying needs is an important part in the product development process.
Latent needs are those that many consumers recognize as important in a final product but unable to articulate in advance (Ulrich, 2015). The latent needs addressed in this study was focusing on identifying consumer requirements in product development in the innovative design method. The challenge in identifying latent needs is finding the method to elicit from consumers the needs which are not addressed by any inventors yet in the present market but would delight the consumers if delivered tomorrow. The purpose of this study is to propose and verify the method in the elicitation of latent needs from consumer needs by introducing a working prototype to the consumers, interviewing, and analyzing responses from the consumers.
This research was conducted during the year the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic spread, most countries were forced to go into lockdown or declare an emergency state. The school was closed and business organizations needed to switch to working from home to prevent the spread. The parents were unable to work from home efficiently as they were worried their children will involve in dangerous incidents if the children were left by themselves. Based on this situation, this study was conducted in finding the latent needs of the parents, childcare workers, and children in order to assist them in going through their problems during this COVID-19 pandemic.
The working prototype was used as material to prepare presentation slides for the consumers' interviews. The first presentation slides were focused on the background problems and ideas for the solutions while the second presentation slides provided consumers with a prototype and story of the product that was believed would be one of the solutions to the problems. Interviews were conducted after both slide presentations. Consumers' responses were obtained and interpreted into consumers' needs in terms of product functions.
In the first study, consumers' interpreted needs from Problem-based interviews and Prototype and Story-based interviews were compared. Based on the results, latent needs interpreted from interviewees' responses and the categories of the needs obtained from the Prototype-based interviews are more than from the Problem-based interview. The latent needs that we were able to obtain from this research were for example, “The device is able to detect small changes in a child while watching he/she sleeping” which could lead into the prevention of unwanted incident such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). This supports our assumption that showing working prototype-based materials with story descriptions can be effective in uncovering potential latent needs.
In the second study, it is assumed that experience, empathy, and knowledge of working prototype is essential elements in product development, therefore, new additional guidelines which are “to write a statement with empathy”, “to write a statement as a designer”, and “to write a statement as someone with experience” were proposed during consumers' needs interpretation to see whether these new guidelines will influence the process of identifying latent needs of consumers. From the result, it is concluded that the number of interpreted needs increased when we applied the new proposed guideline. Although the number is small, the needs might not be interpreted if the new guidelines were not considered. We were also able to obtain a few important latent needs when we applied these new guidelines. A latent need collected from applying the guideline "to write a statement as someone with experience" is “The device is not for teaching love and humanity but for monitoring by watching facial expression, posture, and vital signals such as temperature and heart rate”. We could conclude that including these guidelines upon interpreting raw data from the consumers’ interviews might lead into discovering important and critical latent needs of the consumers.
In the third study, a quantitative evaluation method for identifying latent needs was introduced. The consumers' interpreted needs were rated according to a basis of rating from the three perspectives of importance, latent-ness, and technological feasibility. The Degree of Latent Needs (DLN) was calculated by multiplying these three metrics. Based on the result for the average and variance of DLN mean value for each evaluator which is sufficiently small, it indicates that the basis of rating for three metrics of the DLN is effective. The results also indicate that the 20 highest DLN points of the interpreted needs contain attractive features in terms of design. However, we had gotten some pushback on the average of each interpreted need and its variance which indicates opposing opinions among evaluators. As it is possible that attractive needs are hidden and may lead to the discovery of latent needs through individual pinpoint interviews, the interviews with the minority evaluators were conducted. The interview results indicate that the latent needs with low DLN rates but valuable might be able to be discovered by conducting follow-up interviews such as “The device is able to recognize items (food or not) that a child wants to put in the mouth”. From the results in all three studies, we could conclude that a number of important latent needs are able to be elicited from consumers’ needs by applying the proposed method. In our fourth study, a decision-making method based on the patent analysis between the conceptual design stage and the prototyping stage in the innovative design method was introduced. Conducting a patent strategy was assumed to support how to select the right concept precisely. In this study, by conducting a patent search in this stage by the designer who understood best the product functions and working principles, a supporting method was introduced to assist the designer in their decision-making process. Based on the result, the method was able to observe whether there are dominating companies or not for our concept design. If there is a dominating company, the possibility of not being able to produce our concept becomes bigger. This method may be applied as an indicator to support decisionmaking in the concept design stage in the innovative design method, whether to proceed with the concept design or not and to reduce the possibility of product failure in the future.
From the results of all the studies, we could conclude that these above methods may be applied as assistive tools to support designers’ understanding of consumers’ requirements and selecting the right concept design.
作成者 : Nurhayati Binti Md Issa
