Smart-textronics Product Development Process by Systematic Participatory Design Method

Smart-textronics technology which enables functional textiles has recently been applied in various fields such as smart clothes, smart home and smart health care, and a variety of smart-textronics products have been developed. In this context, the smart-textronics product development process is proposed based on the systematic participatory design method in this paper. The proposed method consists of two phases: in-depth interviews and analyzing. In the phase of in-depth interviews, participants are asked to create journey maps that include activities, pain points and emotional status and to generate solution ideas with sketches and simple prototypes. In the analyzing phase, design researchers investigate the participants’ journey maps, and create personas by identifying critical characteristics with the behavior pattern analysis. Then, each persona’s needs are linked with value elements of the E3 value framework. Finally, pre-survey was conducted to identify smart-textronics market and a smart sofa design is proceeded as the case study to show the applicability of the proposed method.