What-if Design as a Synthesizing Working Method in Product Design

What-if design attempts to support the designer by addressing design problems, both in his own field of expertise, as well as from adjoining domains. To this end, What-if design research focuses on the development of methods and tools for real-time, in-process, design support in order to enhance the search for optimal solutions. The main advantage of this way of designer support is that the design can be evaluated continuously on numerous fields of expertise, enabling the optimization of the search for design solutions.This paper focuses on a bottom-up approach for What-if design and describes examples that illustrate the working methods chosen.