Applying a combined user-centered design approach to assistive shopping trolley development in design education

The design of products/services for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is one of the most strategic challenges in healthy life due to the needs of aging population and the technological advances in enabling low-cost devices (Lattanzio et al., 2014). The success of such systems strongly depends on the designer ability to gather information about the customer needs (e.g. personal characteristics, believes, attitudes, preferences) and contextual barriers and to translate them into satisfactory product features (Bevilacqua et al., 2013; Goldhaber at al., 2012). However, most traditional design approaches have been accused of failing to engage with users in the design process: compromising commercial opportunity and the interactional experience of users (Wilkinson et al., 2014). The present research starts with the aim to verify this statement by exploring the effects of different user understanding techniques on traditional design carried out by students in Industrial Design. A combined design approach that exploits the strengths of systematic engineering design (i.e. structural and logical procedure and functional modelling) and the benefits of some information gathering techniques coming from most User-Centred Design (UCD) approaches, is applied to the generation of new ideas to develop a shopping aid for older people. The application goal is to investigate if the introduction of these information-gathering techniques is useful to achieve an increased product quality. Simultaneously, teaching this approach allows industrial and mechanical engineering students to be better to sensitized toward less-able bodied user needs without leaving procedural methodologies. These research goals are achieved by introducing three techniques for collecting customer needs, wishes and preferences that are respectively desk research, ethnography analysis and role-playing in traditional systematic engineering design and by applying an experimental evaluation protocol to measure their effects on the definition of user requirements, functional models and design concepts. The use case is represented by the design of an assistive device to solve mobility problems of elderly people in crowded environments, e.g. shopping centres. It is well known that elderly have strong difficulties in moving in outdoor spaces: consequently, they prefer to stay at home, but in this way they gradually lose contact with society, which is extremely dangerous for a premature aging of mind and body (Cattan et al., 2005). The design is conducted by students attending an Industrial Design course and enrolled in the last year of a Master of Mechanical Engineering. As the course lasts four months the analysis cannot take into consideration other stakeholders needs as suggested by most systematic design and UCD approaches. The scientific contribution of the present work regards the achieved results and the educational experience in AAL. Experimentations confirm how much effective is ethnography in respect to role-playing in case of products oriented to special target users, and demonstrates that requirements and functional models are affected by the technique used to collect information.