New design heuristics in the digital era

In the digital era, products’ forms do not necessarily follow their function. Design fixation may happen when a designer attempts to generate diverse concepts. New design heuristics for digital design were extracted to support designers in the early conceptual design stage. Ten design heuristics were extracted from 998 RedDot award-winning concept designs (2013-2017) through a five-step process. It was preliminarily tested by four practitioners and proved to have positively influenced their conceptual design. </div

New design heuristics compared with existing ones

Design Heuristics (DHS) as a tool helps boost designers’ creativity in the early design phases. Since the middle of the 20th Century, different DHS have been developed, e.g. general ones such as SCAMPER and 77 Design Heuristics; and specific ones such as DHSfX (design for one-handed use) and DHS for additive manufacturing. With rapid technological developments, an increasing number of products now incorporate technological platforms and services. There is a lack of new DHS relating to such service-based information products. Based on RedDot Concept Design Award entries (2013-2017), we have extracted ten DHS that focus on service-based information products. In this study, we compared our newly derived DHS with existing design heuristics and discovered that although some of our DHS overlapped with existing ones, the new DHS10 were more specific and useful for digital solutions. The preliminary evaluation of the new DHS suggested its potential in helping generate concepts in the early design phase