The researchers proposed a new process for design thinking, in which development plans that incorporate the customer perspective can be shared among relevant people throughout the development process. They will systematize the new process and release it as a “dialogic design synthesis environments” prototype.

Effect of the “dialogic design synthesis environments” aimed at collaboration between front-end and back-end teams from the viewpoint of experience-value capturing

The developed prototype has three effects: (1) treat users as professionals to get effective ideas; (2) invite makers at early planning stage to avoid back and forth in later process; and (3) bridge between artistic and technical design teams to get better user focused experience-value capturing design.

This prototype, which aims at improving the quality and efficiency of dialogic collaboration in design and development process among “users as professionals,” “designers as professionals,” and “makers as professionals” to communicate and co-create. In order to provide an environment that promotes co-creation, the researchers, conscious of the stage of non-verbal images and the stage at which images are related to words, created an algorithm of the conceptual design process, and also constructed software from the perspective of relationship design.

Conventionally, conceptual design was fraught with challenges, since no methods or processes had been established for “users as professionals,” “designers as professionals,” and “makers as professionals” to communicate and co-create. These challenges included the fact that designers would suggest designs with low feasibility without knowing the degree of technical difficulty, the fact that engineering developers would make user-focused technical designs without skillfully imagining the user-experience value in advance, and the fact that it was difficult for production and other development back-end members to communicate the difficulty of feasibility to the development front-end members.

The researchers will recruit companies to try the prototype to verify the application potential and effects of the developed method and to improve the prototype. They will also search for companies which pursue practical application of this technology toward real business.