How to better take user needs into account in the CK theory using QFD

Abstract

Due to human needs, products play a vital role in our life. For this reason, various products are invented and used for daily needs. With the development of technology and the increment of human needs, researchers found it essential to have design methodologies that consider creativity and innovation to achieve more innovative products for customer satisfaction and market success. So, different design methodologies have been designed and created. For instance, the Concept & knowledge theory (C-K theory) and TRIZ are two methodologies that contain creativity and innovation at their core. Besides, different companies concluded that they need to consider and apply user desires to their product to approach market demand and increase user satisfaction. Eventually, different methodologies like the quality function deployment have been created to understand customer needs and translate their voice to design elements. However, the design theories like the C-K theory have the limitation of considering user expectations in its structure. Accordingly, this research tends to integrate the C-K theory and the QFD to develop a new methodology in order to use customer demand in the structure of C-K theory thanks to QFD. The new methodology extracts customer demands from the QFD and transfers them to the structure of the C-K theory. Then, the results of the C-K theory are transferred to the QFD to get the customer-based outcomes for new products. In this research, a home-use lover limb rehabilitation device has been designed as a case study with the proposed methodology based on user needs. Therefore, the methodology demonstrates that user demands are used from the first design step to the last step.

Date	21 Sept 2022
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Mickaël Gardoni (Supervisor)