Product Awareness Between Consumers and Designers – A Family Dining Table Design as Example

Recently, consumer-oriented design has become the key for product development. However, due to a lack of effective consumer opinions by designers, leading designers and consumers have differences on product awareness. This study is based on the Cognitive Structure Model, to understand the differences between designers and consumers based on the family dining table. The purpose is to aid designers in obtaining an understanding and consensus with the consumer for their products. This research used Mind Mapping to work with Means-End Chain to perform designers’ cognitive approach followed by an implication matrix of consumer awareness survey. The results can be used to divide the designers and consumers awareness into four parts: “positive consensus”, “negative consensus”, “designer subjective perception” and “subjective perception of consumers”. Finally, there is a streamlined Hierarchical Value Map to show the product design guidelines. The family dining table design focused on the steps of product design ideas. The focus is to assist the industry to accurately grasp the designer and consumer awareness of consensus and to work out effective product development direction.