Design for Desirability: An Innovation-Focused Research Collaboration between Academia and Industry

This paper outlines an innovation-focused design research collaboration that connects New Zealand design and manufacturing industry with advanced design thinking about design for desirability, a research area pursued at AFFECT - the Centre for Affective Design Research at Massey University in Wellington (NZ). Nowadays, it’s all about offering products that are desirable; products need to appeal to their users on emotional, social and intuitive levels. Functionand usability are still important issues of product design, but unless the product is instantly and as well as continuously appealing, chances for success are slim. Academic design researchers and five New Zealand companies have collaborated in a governmentally funded “Growth Innovation Pilot Initiative” scheme, that aims to foster design for desirability thinking and capabilities by means of knowledge sharing and enterprise training in the form of design projects and workshops.Within this collaboration, Master of Design (MDes) projects were conducted that created visionary product concepts for animal farm management and radio communication utilizing the perceptual product experience framework [1]. This paper describes the process of this project, highlightin the initial interviews with the companies, the collaborative knowledge sharing and enterprise training workshops, and the two MDes projects that aimed to foster and advance design for desirability thinking together with the companies. The described project provides a novel collaborative model between industry and academia that challenges advanced thinking and implementation of design for desirability in small- and medium-sized (SME) companies with the aim of improving international competitiveness of their products. Such companies often lack theknowledge and resources to devise strategies and adopt operational ways of working with desirability focussed design conceptualisation programmes that require a holistic understanding of the users, which can be provided through academic design research collaborations