This study explores the characteristics of collaboration between people with Japanese value orientation in co-design workshops. We define co-design as an approach where designers collaborate with non-designers to design new products or services. This research investigates the effect of culture and value orientation on co-design between designers and non-designers in a Japanese context. Through interviews with four professional designers, we identified that the participation of Japanese non-designers in a co-design workshop might be hindered by the presence of an expert, who is perceived as a person in a higher social position. With 20 subjects, we experimentally investigated the impact of power distance on collaboration. European and Japanese groups of non-designers generated and discussed ideas in two conditions-with or without a professional designer in the group. Through behaviour and speech analysis, we assessed the quality of collaboration within the group. Depending on their power distance score, the contributions of participants were affected differently by the presence of a professional designer. Unlike in the European groups, the presence of a designer in a Japanese group created a hierarchical structure that hindered the participation of non-designers. This work is expected to support the development of co-design methods adapted to their cultural contexts.

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.

Various tools for participatory design approach have been developed to support users to engage design process. Doll scenario is proposed as a generative tool for letting participants make and enact scenarios. However, suitable context to practice doll scenario is unclear in comparison with other tools using scenario. Therefore, our overall objective is to increase understanding of characteristics of making scenario in two different ways of expression; with doll and storyboard. We developed a doll scenario method, doll staging. The tool was evaluated in comparison to storyboard at a workshop which is a part of a new product development project in a corporate. The workshop was evaluated by semi-structured interviews with the participants and observations of the workshop and design outcome. The result suggests that doll staging allows participants to think from users’ perspective in developing new idea. These findings provides new direction to choose scenario based design tools according to objective or context of design project. We also discuss potentials and research directions to use tools for developing scenario in corporate contexts.