Designs that surpass imagination are born from discomfort outside the knowledge domain

Analyzing the mind process of industrial designers led to hypotheses that industrial design (1) not only involves defining artistic appearance but also builds on concepts derived from voice of customer and establishes independent functional requirements, and (2) does not just meet the customer expectation with conventional forms but defines products that surpass the customer imagination by starting from discomfort outside the knowledge domain. Our analysis of 475 products that won Japan's Good Design Award revealed that 39% of them are designed from the expressed functional requirements, 20% surpassed people's imagination, and 67% of the latter came out from negative discomfort.