Supporting Early Design Phases by Structuring Innovative Ideas: An Integrated Approach Proposal

It is now a well-established fact that the development of a new design project is complex and takes place within conflicting contexts consisting of technical, economical, organizational and social aspects. Today, the generation of innovative products is a key issue for companies' development and competitiveness. However, experiences in practice highlight the difficulties and the weaknesses of the cooperation processes in the context of the early design phases, especially when a new concept or an idea is proposed for consideration. During these early phases, exploring new alternatives (new technical concepts, technologies...) can prove very difficult and off-putting as the actors find themselves devoid of knowledge in certain areas and tend to remain faithful to traditional solutions that are already proven to be stable and reliable. Various industrial fieldworks suggest that before launching a new project, an important amount of work is required in order to convince the participants and the management that the new idea is worthy of consideration for the given application. At this time, the goal is to legitimise the proposed idea but also to organize (and to invent) the necessary management processes in order to prepare for the launch of the future project. Therefore, designers sometimes have to work during informal pre-project periods to disseminate new ideas or concepts in order to introduce them as new product design innovations. In this context of early design phases, actors discuss the new ideas, drafts of solutions and exchange preliminary information that may be partially validated, incomplete, uncertain and ambiguous or even risky. Cooperation processes are quite unstructured and the confrontation of the different actors' points of view leads to informal and unofficial information exchanges. These phases of investigation and negotiation are not formalized design phases but participate in the new concepts emergence process. Moreover, they sometimes lead to the construction of official project development plans. Indeed, at the same time the work carried out during these phases widely determines the success of some the innovative projects. If a proper work is carried out, the arguments developed at this stage should lead to the definition of proper specifications (technical, organisational and economical), providing the input for an official development project. This paper presents the results of a pluri-disciplinary research into the context of early design stages carried out jointly by engineering design researchers, specialists of design computing and numerical engineering, and industrial sociologists.