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Abstract. In Design by Shopping, designers explore the design space to gain an insight into trades and feasible and impractical solutions, as well as to learn about alternatives before optimization and selection. The design space consists of multidimensional sets of data and, in order to select the best design from amongst numerous alternatives, designers may use several different graphs. In this study, we test to find the most appropriate graph to indicate the best solution corresponding to a set of objectives represented by a design scenario (1). A further constraint is that this must be done in the shortest possible time (2). Three graph types are tested in three different design scenarios where one car has to be chosen from a total of 40. A response quality index is proposed which computes the quality of a designer's choice for any given scenario. In total, 90 tests with 30 participants were performed. The Parallel Coordinates Plot proved to be the best graph for selection in Design by Shopping.

Design space exploration (DSE) describes the systematic activity of discovery and evaluation of the elements in a design space in order to identify optimal solutions by reducing the design space to an area of performance. Designers sample thousands of design points iteratively, explore the design space, gain knowledge about the problem and make design decision. The literature tells us that DSE results in a decision of quality called informed decision, which is supported by information visualization. The representation of design points is seen as primordial to gain an understanding of the problem and make an informed decision. In our work, we have sought to identify what type of graph is best suited to the discovery phase, and enables designers to make an informed decision. We designed a web platform with four design problems, and carried out an experiment with 42 participants. We found a graph that was better suited to making a decision of quality and to gaining greater understanding: the scatter plot matrix.

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Product success depends on its capacity to meet users’ expectations. Human Centred Design approach helps to reach this success by focussing on users’ needs in the design process. These needs are as well functional as hedonic. Designing products requires then to design hedonic properties affecting users’ perception. For sport products, people wants to improve their performances while maintaining their health. Sport products are then considered not only “sporty” but also “healthy”. Thus, integrating both health and sport expectations into the design process are necessary.Last decades, Affective Engineering was developed to integrate perception into the design process. Applying this approach for sport products may allow defining and mixing sport and health perceptual characteristics all along the design process. However, defining these characterisitics into requirements implies to translate them into semantic terms. If we observe semantic descriptors for sport products and for health products, they seem opposite. In this paper, we aim defining a semantic space representative and respectful of both domains, sport and health, while they oppose.

Current development of renewable energy systems (RES) is characterised by an increasing participation of citizens in the upstream decision-making process. These citizens can be future users of the RES but also members of a Renewable Energy Community that develop RES. They can be at the same time Renewable Energy producer, investor and consumer. Moreover, several type of businesses and terms are used to cope with social innovations within the energy sector: local renewable projects, sustainable energy communities or community of renewable energy production. So, actors' engagement opens new solutions for designers who are induced to share alternatives before making decisions. They usually impose constraints since the early phases of the design process. This approach implies for designers to consider new criteria related to citizens motivations and barriers. This paper presents a study to define the main factors that drive people to contribute in social innovation schemes for clean-energy transition. After a state of the art, a survey about 6 main factors and 18 criteria is presented. The analysis based on the responses from 34 participants (i.e. experts) reveals 2 most important factors of motivation and 2 principal barrier sources.

Products appearances are made of design choices influencing the way products are perceived. Products semantics is a methods used to understand and anticipate this phenomena. Nowadays, consumers consider sport products not only as “sport” but also as “health” products. Designers may then develop them as “sport-health” products. However, perception of “sport-health” products may vary according to the need to fit sport or health context of use. We present in this paper our experimental approach to understand the influence of sport and health contexts on “sport-health” semantics.