A Proposal and Evaluation of Co-design Tools with a Focus on Anonymity

抄録

Co-design approaches invite users in the early phases of design process for designing new products or services, which helps collecting users’ Kansei data. As users are not formally trained as designer, tools and techniques have been proposed to help users to be creative in co-design. However, hierarchical structure in design teams has negative impacts on quality of collaboration in co-design. In this paper, as a step for employing co-design approach to collect users’ Kansei values, we developed new tools for idea generation and selection. Anonymity was expected to help the participants to freely express their thought. The tools were assessed in a lab-based experiment with sixteen Japanese subjects. Findings show that anonymity leads to higher both objective and perceived creativity in idea generation and increases critical discussion and participants’ perceived performance in idea selection. These findings have the potential to be used in developing tools for design practice.