Data-Driven Design in Concept Development: Systematic Review and Missed Opportunities

Abstract

The paper presents a systematic literature review investigating definitions, uses, and application of data-driven design in the concept development process. The analysis shows a predominance of the use of text mining techniques on social media and online reviews to identify customers’ needs, not exploiting the opportunity granted by the increased accessibility of IoT in cyber-physical systems. The paper argues that such a gap limits the potential of capturing tacit customers’ needs and highlights the need to proactively plan and design for a transition toward data-driven design.

Data-Driven Design Challenges in the Early Stages of the Product Development Process

“…During the "Clarification of the task" phase, DDD is mostly used to identify the customers' needs through data mining (Bertoni 2020). For example, Bae and Kim (2011) used data mining on surveys to identify and highlight key functional attributes that influence purchase of digital cameras.…”

“…Firstly, there is an important observation that could already be drawn out of the knowledge sharing phase: the fact that most of the data types proposed by the participants are not dedicated to a DDD approach. Meaning they would have been produced anyway even with other product development approaches (Bertoni 2020). Indeed, designers often compose with already existing data sets or easy to implement data collection.…”

Understanding Usage Data-Driven Product Planning: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Finally, as our research focuses on product usage data only, the integration of non-usage data should be analysed, e.g., how can data from sources like customer reviews complement the usage phase data? Especially for the identification of customer needs, there is already a high number of approaches using text mining techniques on social media and online reviews (Bertoni, 2020).…”

Transforming Data Into Added-Value Information: The Design of Scientific Measurement Models Through the Lens of Design Theory

“…The variety of usages that could be made from data is often emphasized, for example through the 20 contributions of the special issue of the Journal of Mechanical Design (Kim et al, 2017) covering topics as various as discovering future design and technological opportunities thanks to patent mining techniques, modelling complex parts of the body in new manners, giving new insights on the critical functions to be included in the design of new products and services. Literature in design also more specifically reports on the beneficial use of data in the concept development phase of the design process (Escandón-Quintanilla et al, 2018;Bertoni, 2020). The transformation of data into usages is often described through the "Data Information Knowledge Wisdom" hierarchy (Rowley, 2007) or more recently the "data-information-knowledge" chain (Abbasi et al, 2016).…”

“…Regarding the transformation of data into information, scholars report on several issues. (Bertoni, 2020) notices the tendency to rather resort to relatively easy-to-use data (such as text mining of social networks) rather than building new data generation methods that would bring more valuable information (such as resorting to the use of sensors giving information on the product in use) because of the higher complexity of such approaches. The design effort to be made for extracting new types of data is also reported as an issue by (Montecchi and Becattini, 2020) in the context of using data to encourage sustainable behaviours.…”