Consumer response to designed products has a profound effect on how products are interpreted, approached and used. Product design is crucial in determining this consumer response. Research in this field has been centered on studying the relationship between product features and subjective responses of users and consumers to those features. The subject of aesthetic or styling design process has been relatively neglected despite the important role of this process in fulfilling intended consumer response through product design. In this paper, we present a review of descriptive design research on aesthetic design process, and highlight limitations of this research. We also suggest opportunities for further descriptive research on the subject of aesthetic design process.

The base (BOP) and the top (TOP) of the world income pyramid represent the people living in poverty and the people from developed countries, respectively. In the approach of business development combined with poverty alleviation, the design of products for the BOP plays an important role. There is an urgent need to develop an understanding of the process of designing products for the BOP. Requirements handling is an important ingredient of a design process. This research, using a protocol study, examined the differences between the requirements handling behaviour of designers when they design a product for the BOP and TOP markets. We found differences between their requirements handling behaviour in terms of their attention to different topics of requirements, and their handling of solution-specific and solution-neutral requirements.