Potential Demands Analysis For Product Design

People's demand varies with the change of social context and those products as commodities would be phased out which fail to meet people's ever-changing demands. In the modern society with material abundance, people call for more"emotional experience"of using a product than the mere product functions. Therefore, industrial designers should probe into consumers'deeper demands, or potential demands in the designing process which always begins with"problem- seeking".This thesis firstly discusses the demand-related concepts by analyzing potential demand and individual consumer psychology, cause of potential demand as well as the links between consumer psychology and behavior, demonstrating the complexity of consumer potential demand, and pointing out the necessities of consumer lifestyle research which can assist in analyzing consumer potential demand.In the consumer lifestyle research, the methodology of science of human affairs is introduced to analyze its research object; then the marketing concepts of consumer role and product life cycle are employed to elaborate clearly the abstract concepts of"human"and"affairs"in the methodology and to specifically analyze consumers'potential demand based on consumer lifestyle research.In the research method respect, this paper firstly illustrates the function and application of varied research methods by introducing"Persona"and"Scenario", which are widely used in UED (User Experience Design) field, to link qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis, and scenario-based"brainstorming", which can inspire designers to find consumer demands and ways to meet them. Then the paper proposes approaches of analyzing these demands to further obtain consumers'potential demands. Finally, it presents based on the methodology research the analyzing flow chart of gaining potential demand and designer's duties in varied phases.This paper concludes with the presentation of a project --"Demand Analysis of the Future C Family for Changhong", which lends strong practical support to the potential demand research methods.