Early Stage New Product and Service Design Process - The Use of Graphical Representations

This paper summarises the initial results from a study that translates a research instrument into a business application that supports the early stage of new productservice system development, with the objective of clarifying design specifications. The business approach, called system design characterisation (SDC), contains five different graphical representations. Following the method of procedural action research, the feasibility, usability and utility of the graphical representations used in SDC are tested. Drawing from literature of multiple disciplines engineering, design and cognitive science – how SDC may bridge the gap of design techniques that use multiple representations to manage complex information is discussed in this paper. The result of this study intend to contribute to the on-going discussions in the research community of design research or design methodology, as well as that of research methodology in terms of the use of procedural action research for business application development. INTRODUCTION The new product development process is one of the riskiest business activities. Early attention to risk, right from the early stages of development, can significantly reduce cost and time to market (Goffin & Mitchell, 2005). The new product or service development process generally starts with steps for idea generation and market and technical assessment, which are followed by concept and detail design, development and testing, and ends with market launch (Cooper, 1988). This study focuses on the early stage development of systems of products and services – product-service systems (PSSs), and in particular, it explores the use of graphical representations in a design approach that supports this development stage. The study of the effects of external representations in problem solving is not new in cognitive science (Zhang, 1997). However, for new product and service development, where the problem to solve concerns the effectiveness of transforming complex

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