Process matters: From car owner experiences to automotive design proposals

Collecting and analysing user experiences, communicating discovered patterns, translating information into design proposals and materialising designed features is central to design driven research. This process immerses design teams into all aspects of users’ experiences, helping them empathise with and scrutinise every detail until designers own the experiences and produce design proposals addressing end users’ needs in unique ways leading to disruptive innovation. Design practice’s strength is crystallising solutions into visualised and interactive proposals, presenting in-depth details of the look, feel and emotions they stimulate, and assisting decision making in product, service and business innovations. Existing research focusses on early stage collection of lived user experiences and final visualisation of the design proposal, yet seems to miss detailed discussion of the core bridging of user experiences and precise design proposals. We describe optimising a process supporting designers continuously switching between gathering user experiences and industry/market contexts when generating automotive design proposals.