Journal Article

Desumers as Ideators in New Product Development

Abouelsoud, Aziza Maher Ahmed

2024

Overview

Studies confirm that, successful products must be based on understanding users through direct communication with users during product development process. Users may have less to offer during product development than expected, due to limited abilities to describe what they expect from the product (Christensen and Bower 1996). There must be different ways to involve users, depending on which users and at which phase of the development process. Approaches and characteristics of users are still an issue of debate. Hippel's work concerning lead users plays an important role in this area of study, since then, there was a growth in user terminology, such as prosumers, and core users. This paper explores what is the term \" DESUMERS The term is a portmanteau of the words (Designer and consumer) to describe users that would be enabled by the product designers to participate in creating innovative ideas or what is known as Ideators within the product development process based on the \"Design by Approach\" (M. A. Kauliu.1998). An increased number of companies call for innovative ideas, as in the case of Ikea. These companies aim to detect innovative ideas that could increase its position in the market. Such calls can last for short or long times and a substantial number of Ideators would respond, this naturally would lead to enormous numbers of ideas that consume lots of effort and time in order to revies, and because it's an open call; creative and uncreative ideas would appear. This paper suggests involving Desumers as Ideators in the ideation phase, of design process based on certain characteristics they own. The novelty of this approach would enrich the sub takes gained for the designer while help Desumers get benefits (financially and socially). Research problem: The \"Design by\" approach used among designers should gain better outcomes in a shorter time and less effort, this may not be achieved unless the targeted users have certain creative characters, this would be achieved by building standards in the form of characters of those creative users coined, Desumers. The research seeks achieving this through answering the following questions: - Who are the suggested users coined\" Desumers\"? - What are the characteristics of Desumers'? - Could Desumers help designers gain better ideation when involved? Research aim: Introducing \"Desumers\" who can participate successfully in design process based on Design by Users' Approach &defining their characteristics, as a new term that refers to users with higher level of creativity than lead users.

• Publisher: الجمعية العربية للحضارة والفنون الإسلامية
• Subject: الأفكار الابتكارية / القدرات الإبداعية / المنتجات الجديدة / تصميم المنتجات