Designing the constraints: creation exercises for framing the design context

Developing an understanding of a design problem by exploring the context in which the new product will be marketed and used is often a crucial part of the design process but has been little studied outside the fashion and textiles industries. A user experience design team in a European car company sought to understand the interests and values of potential Chinese customers by carrying out a co-creation exercise with a set of representative Chinese consumers, in order to understand how to design accessory products and services for them. This paper compares the co-creation exercise, which produced accounts of the consumers’ values in verbal narrative form, to the constraint gathering research phase of artistic design processes, which typically produce sets of constraints, usable design features and desirable emergent properties to express the space of possible designs in visuospatial form as mood boards.