Abstract
Solving the environmental problem has become an important issue in our society. In the design field, a new type of artifact has been pursued. In this study, the authors focus attention on the idea of "Latent Function". Latent Function is defined as a new function appeared when artifact's surroundings changes. If the number of artifacts with abundant Latent Function increases in society, the decrease of wasteful action and the improvement of recycling are expected. The purpose of this research is to extract features of the users' discovery process of Latent Function of an artifact. In the investigation, subjects are asked to find as much Latent Function as possible from several artifacts. From the above investigation, it is guessed that the Latent Function discovery process is related to the limit of the human cognitive ability. In this paper, the experiments on Latent Function discovery by users is reported and discussed.
