Ethnography for Smart Service Systems in Product Design

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing, highly competitive world, product design requires swift translation of human needs and desires into technical specifications for the development of devices and services that meet those needs [1]. This calls for a complex integration of qualitative and quantitative data. But despite some notable successes, product design failures are today both extensive and expensive, consuming enormous amounts of time and human labor [2]. Any improvement to the process of product design would be of great public benefit.