How the Next Generation of Products Pushes to Rethink the Role of Users and Designers

Abstract An emerging category of products, such as gadgets and smart devices, provides the user with high levels of customization but imposes to revise the roles of both users and designers. The Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) framework has been proved to describe both designers perspective and customers use in a proper way. The paradigm has to be adapted when the high level of product customization enables all the users to reinvent the product itself. Researchers, amateurs, makers are now capable to fully interact with the electronic, the control software and even the shape of finished products. Main enablers of such change are several emerging technological solutions, both hardware (such as low cost 3D printers, programmable electronic boards, low cost sensors and actuators) and software (such as user-manufacturing web platforms). A design language that encompasses this new way of doing design becomes a priority. The paper investigates the role of FBS model as a practical response to this topic and presents a user-manufacturing web platform based on this theoretical framework. The design and development of a new smart object, performed through the introduced platform, is presented in order to support the description.

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