Sarah Wakes

Today’s design projects are often challenged by their interdisciplinary nature as well as increasing product complexity and time pressure (Cross 1994; Wicklund 1994; Freudenthal 1999). A recommended way to handle complexity in the design process is to work systematically (Roozenburg and Eekels 1995; Freudenthal 1999), with checklists and guidelines offering a possibility to support product designers. The paper discusses the development and evaluation of a set of product design guidelines for designers working on complex design projects. It describes the generation of a comprehensive set of generic and practically aimed product design guidelines that holistically support product designers within complex design projects to create useful, usable and satisfying product solutions. The guidelines are designed to be generically applicable and are presented in a checklist format. The guidelines are organised into seven sections, based on the stages of an iterative design development process (den Buurman 1997; Freudenthal 1999). Research has been undertaken to investigate the usefulness and usability of the generated guidelines. A small-scale pilot-study with twelve design students, thre