Product design is rapidly shifting from the conventional paradigm of creativity-oriented and model-based design toward a new paradigm of user-centered and data-driven design. Against such a background, this paper discusses the values of massively crowdsourced customer reviews for engineering design education. Recently, customers become growingly motivated to share their first-hand experience of using a product on various e-commerce and social platforms in the format of customer reviews (CRs). In practice, these informative CRs are increasingly employed by professional designers to support their early-stage design decision making. Unlike expert designers who are more comfortable at comprehending ill-structured CRs without any predefined hypothesis or structured design process, student designers should be carefully guided to uncover the implicit values of CRs for their design projects. Based on a novel integration of relevant design methods and recommendation approaches, this paper presents a CR-driven function formulation method. Student designers can follow the new method to abstract useful information from readily available customer reviews to formulate a unique engineering design problem as a set of functional requirements.
Dr. Ang Liu is a senior lecturer at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia
Yuchen Wang is an undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student in University of New South Wales,Australia. He assists in engineering design education, meanwhile, his student off-class research focuses on space theme projects such as sun sensor and thermal controller.
Dr. Yun Dai is a postdoc research fellow in the Viterbi School of Engineering, at the University of Southern California, and also the program manager of the Viterbi iPodia Program (ViP). Her research interest broadly involves engineering education, learning technology, and intercultural education.
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