A Pilot Study of Cognitive-Neuroscience Mechanism in Product Concept Evaluation

Abstract

Novel, functional, and aesthetic products are thought to have a high likelihood of success in the marketplace. While making sound design decisions is a critical ability of good designers, evaluating product concepts for their future successes in the marketplace is a challenging task. In design classes, only about half of product concepts selected by student design teams may be retained and prototyped into final products, i.e., about half of student design teams find that their initial product concepts are difficult to make workable and change to different concepts by the time they create prototypes for testing. This paper investigates if electrophysiological concomitants in product concept evaluation may potentially be used to improve students’ and designers’ product concept evaluation processes. The preliminary data in this pilot study indicate that distinct decision-making processes may occur during evaluations of product concepts on novelty, functionality, and aesthetics, evidenced by brain activation differences among students.