Defining Design Subjects According to the Context in Which Problems Occur

It is necessary to define adequate design subjects to develop attractive and useful products. Not only functional elements but also the ease of use and good affective design are desirable. To bring new values to products, design subjects must be defined without depending on heuristics. However, a problem tends to be the starting point in developing a new product. Problems are relative to the context in which they occur and are typically composed of many causes. Therefore, the study focuses on the context in which problems occur. To make the context easy to be grasped and analyzed, context items were provided. State-keywords were extracted from the descriptions of the context as data for analysis. They were classified into clusters and consequently interpreted to design subjects without heuristics. This chapter shows the process of this method. The results of the experiments used to verify the effect of this method are described and discussed.