Customer review-driven function formulation for design education

Product design is rapidly shifting from the conventional paradigm of creativity-oriented and model-based design toward a new paradigm of user-centered and data-driven design. Against such a background, this paper discusses the values of massively crowdsourced customer reviews for engineering design education. Recently, customers become growingly motivated to share their first-hand experience of using a product on various ecommerce and social platforms in the format of customer reviews (CRs). In practice, these informative CRs are increasingly employed by professional designers to support their early-stage design decision making. Unlike expert designers who are more comfortable at comprehending ill-structured CRs without any predefined hypothesis or structured design process, student designers should be carefully guided to uncover the implicit values of CRs for their design projects. Based on a novel integration of relevant design methods and recommendation approaches, this paper presents a CR-driven function formulation method. Student designers can follow the new method to abstract useful information from readily available customer reviews to formulate a unique engineering design problem as a set of functional requirements.