A Methodology for the Integrated Design of Customer Goods

Future products face dramatically challenges to meet continuously moving customers' requirements, differ from competitors and be friendly with the environment in a global sustainability where company profits are there as well. It leads to re-organize company processes, mainly the design and development process, and the tools and methods to respond to this demand. This PhD project deals with developing a new integrated design methodology to be applied on a high level and globalized consumer goods industry. It has been developed for and applied on the leather goods industry in Thailand. The proposed design methodology leans on an emotional design approach to understand customers and make them active in the design process on one hand and on the other hand on expressing the company identity as a main driver of the engineering design process. Consequently, the methodology integers customers' satisfaction, brand benefits and the optimized engineering supports. The tools and methods developed were implemented and tested on an original case in a Thai leather goods manufacturer.