What Sound Will My Product Make? Birth of a New Design Requirement

Contemporary changes in society, technology and production are quickly orienting design approaches, methods, processes and tools towards more significant, comprehensible, sustainable and shareable solutions. The design research attitude to approach problems in terms of setting and not only solving now suggests that the sounds made by products could be one of the next design challenges in order to try to achieve these results. This chapter investigates the role of the sound requirement in the meta-design phase. Far from being subject to unfair non-designed product sounds and far from merely trying to cancel them with acoustic insulation, we can “design” product sounds during the meta-design phase, introducing sound and numerous ways of expressing it, as a new product requirement. Trying to add sound requirements to the polytechnic design method based on needs and services as qualitative and quantitative drivers to achieve design for innovation, means working together to shape and strengthen product identity, intelligibility and effectiveness. Facing this challenge, the genesis and development of the needs-requirements-services method are investigated, comparing existing design approaches and proposing their enrichment, in order to create the basis for a dedicated scientific approach to enable the design of new voices for products.