Understanding and Utilizing Requirements and Needs for Product and System Design

Abstract

Understanding human needs and user requirements is very critical to realize appropriate and acceptable product and system design. The primary measure of the success of a product, service, or software system is in its ability to meet the purpose for which it was intended (Jones, I. et al. 2015). To translate customer needs into more quantifiable engineering requirements and utilize the requirements for design, several methodologies have been established and used within the design community. Examples include Quality Function Deployment (QFD) based methods (Pullman, M.E. et al. 2002, Jin, J. et al. 2014), the Kano model and Affinity Diagrams (Xu, Q. et al. 2009), Trend Mining by (Tucker, C. and Kim, H. 2011), Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining (Liu, B. and Zhang, L. 2012), and Preference Comparison (Aurup, G.M. and Akgunduz, A. 2012). To further advance the research domain of understanding and utilizing requirements and needs for product and system design, this issue includes three articles that provide a fundamental understanding of human needs and their relationship with engineering design and systematic customer requirement extraction and evaluation criteria selection methods.