Scenario-based Affective Design for Product Ecosystems

Q.L. Xu, M.G. Helander

School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798

An important issue in today’s industry is design and innovation that accommodate customer’s affective
needs. This gives rise to the emerging trend of design for product ecosystems, where an ecosystem is
expected to convey more added-value than single products. However, existing studies in this field lack
a comprehensive formulation and design methodology of product ecosystem that effectively includes
the customer’s affective experience in the loop. In this regard, this research proposes a scenario-based
design approach to assist the design of product ecosystems for addressing customer’s affective needs.
A comprehensive formulation of the infrastructure of product ecosystem is presented. Next, various
scenarios are designed to facilitate the elicitation and fulfillment of customer’s affective needs. The
scenario-based design approach includes three major steps, namely, (1) scenario construction, (2)
scenario deployment, and (3) scenario evaluation. Data mining techniques are used to find the
interrelations between customer’s response and the design elements of product ecosystems. Such
interrelations provide useful guidelines for product ecosystem design. The proposed method is applied
for vehicle ecosystem design focusing on the features of the car product. It is proposed that the concept
of ecosystem is an innovative step toward affective engineering and the scenario-based approach is
appropriate to include the customers experience in the product design and evaluation cycle so as to
achieve high added-value.

INTRODUCTION On the other hand, existing methods in affective design such

Recent years witnessed an increasing awareness of design
and innovation that accommodate customer’s affective needs.
This is mainly because the affective aspects of customer needs
play an important role in forming the customer’s perceptions,
which will ultimately influence the customer’s purchasing
behaviors (Helander and Tham, 2003). However, due to their
intangible and transient nature, the affective aspects of
customer’s needs are difficult to capture. This is especially true
in today’s engineering environment, where design is no longer
about isolated activities for single products. Instead, the
relationships between multiple products have to be considered.
These gives rise to the emerging trend of designing product
ecosystems for affective human factors. Such practices are
expected to bring more added-value to the product, and hence,
secure the manufacturer’s business success (Jiao et al, 2007).
However, a comprehensive formulation of product
ecosystem that effectively includes the customer’s affective
experience in the loop is largely absent in the literature.
Moreover, systematic procedures that facilitate the elicitation,
representation, and fulfillment of the affective customer needs
lag behind practical applications. Classical research in the
human- or user-centered design (HCD/UCD) focuses on the
hardware and software design projects, and reflects an
awareness of the importance of human-computer interface
design (Carroll, 2000). However, it does not address the
general product design issues, which are beyond interface
design per se. In addition, the methods are typically focused on
the functionality and usability aspects of products rather than
the affective or emotional aspects.
as Kansei engineering (Nagamachi, 1996) usually examine the
user’s affective responds in relation to the focal product itself.
The environmental factors such as product combinations and
interactions, and co-existing customers, are not accommodated
in these methods.
In this regard, this research proposes a comprehensive
model of the product ecosystem, which emphasizes the
affective perceptions and experience of customers, and takes
account of the product interactions and environments. It is
particularly suitable to designing consumer products that
involve intensive communications of customers, products and
the environment. In order to design such an ecosystem, a
scenario-based design approach in proposed, where various
scenarios of customers using the products are created for the
purpose of testing the effectiveness of ecosystems. Customer
response data collected through scenario deployment is
analyzed using data mining techniques such that the mapping
relationships between customers’ affective needs and the
design elements of the ecosystem is revealed.
The remaining of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2
introduces the formalism of product ecosystem considering the
multiple aspects of the design task, especially the affective
human factors. The scenario-based design methodology is
proposed in Section 3, focusing on how customer experience is
accommodated in diverse situations. A case study of car
ecosystem design is presented in Section 4, followed by the
discussions of the effectiveness of the method in Section 5.
Conclusions are made in Section 6, highlighting the
innovativeness of the method.
 DESIGN OF PRODUCT ECOSYSTEM
From Product to Ecosystem
The concept of product ecosystem goes beyond the
traditional scope of individual products by incorporating
multiple viewpoints related to the products, while taking
account of the process-oriented customer experience. In this
research, a product ecosystem refers to a dynamic unit
consisting of all products and users, as well as their interactive
relations. As illustrated in Figure 1, a product ecosystem
consists of two types of entities, namely customers and
products, and three types of relationships, namely,
customer-customer, customer-product, and product-product.
Product
1 collectively considered as the ambience of that product.
Product
3 However, the focus of this research is on customers’
Customer
Customer 2 The objective of defining product ecosystems is to create the
1
Ambience Product
N customer-product-ambience interactions at the systems level. A
Product
Customer
2 M
Product ecosystem
Legend Entity: Customer Product
Relation: Customer-Customer
Customer-Product Product-Product
Figure 1. Entities and relations in a product ecosystem
Accordingly, a product ecosystem is formally represented as
e
a tuple: P ~ E ,  , where E represents the entities
involved in the ecosystem, and  denote the relationships
between entities. The entities belong to one of two types, i.e.,
E ~ E , E , where E  c1 , c2 , ..., cM  is a set of M
C P C
customers, and E   p1 , p2 , ..., p N  is a set of N products.
P
The set of products can be considered as the basic design
elements of the product ecosystem. Three types of
relationships exist between entity-pairs and are defined
as:  ~ 1 ,  2 , 3 . The interaction between customers is
denoted as 1 : E  E , which can be represented as a design
C C
structure matrix (DSM) whose elements indicate the
interrelationships between customers. Similarly, the
relationship between products is represented as  2 : E  E ,
P P
which is a DSM whose elements indicates the interrelation
between products. Finally, the correspondence between
customers and products is represented as a domain mapping
matrix (DMM),  3 : E  E , which indicates the relationship
C P
between a customer and a product. It should be noted that the
relationships represented by  in the above formulation are
generic and do not embody any real relations unless the
customer experience is involved. In other words, the
relationships only exist temporarily when a customer carries
out an activity by using one or a few products or interacting
with other customers. This point is made evident in the
subsequent discussions on customer experience.
Furthermore, the ambience is defined according to a
customer’s interaction with his/her surroundings that consists
of products and customers. It is context-sensitive, i.e., it is
formed based on specific perspectives of customers. The
ambience for customer i is defined as Am  ci   E , E
Ci  P i 
,
where E

C i
 c , c , ..., c   E , c E
C 
C i
and

  p , p , ..., p   E . In the example of Figure 1,
1 2 M' i
P i P
E 1 2 N'
Customer 1 is directly related to two customers {Customer 2,
Customer M} and two products {Product 1, Product 2}, which
collectively constitute the ambience of Customer 1. Ambience
can also be defined for a product, i.e., the customers and
products that are directly related to a focal product are
experience and affective feeling. Therefore, the ambience from
the product perspective is not studied.
real product usage context, so as to entail a scenario of the entire
system design for customer experience. It emphasizes the
lesson learned repeatedly by industrial designers is that design
problems, especially for complex systems with multiple
products, have a context, and that the optimization of one part
of a design may often prove to be sub-optimal or even invalid
in a broader context. Therefore, it is useful to frame the
problem of customer-product interaction in the related
ambience, thus avoiding the classic pitfall of design divorced
from the context of the problem (Hewett et al., 1992; Giboin,
1999). Thus, the interactions among customers, products, and
ambience form a relatively complete and dynamic
infrastructure of the product ecosystem.
Customer Perception and Experience
The affective human factors for designing a product
ecosystem encompass two dimensions, namely customer
perception and customer experience. The perception is the
temporal feeling of a customer when carrying out an activity. In
each activity, the customer may interact with multiple
customers and/or products. On the other hand, the affective
feelings may evolve along the sequence of activities. This is
considered as the customer experience, which consists of a
series of customer’s affective states. With these considerations,
the product ecosystem is reformulated as Figure 2. The focal
customer (e.g., Customer i) is observed against his/her
ambience, which includes the sequence of activities (denoted as
hexagons) in relation with the products and customers. The
series of activities that lead to the customer experience is
defined as A  a , a , ..., a  , where L is the number of
1 2 L
activities involved in the sequence. These activities are
connected by causal and precedence links, where a causal link
indicates that an activity is the result of another activity, and a
precedence link indicates a non-causal, sequential relation.
 customer experience. The customer experience is shaped by the
Customer i Ambience objective features of products such as its familiarity and novelty,
(focal customer) as well as its intrinsic valence. Customer experience emerges
Product Product from patterns in the way users and products communicate such
1 N’ as motivational forces and coping ability versus challenge.
Besides, the features in ambience, such as environmental
Perception

Experience 3
settings, cultural and individual differences, and so on, also
1 2 … L
mediate customer experience.
4
SCENARIO-BASED PRODUCT ECOSYSTEM DESIGN
Customer Customer
1 M’ The customer perception and experience involved in the
formation of customer affective feeling is intrinsically
Product ecosystem
process-oriented. In other words, it consists of events that may
occur in sequence or in parallel owing to many unforeseen
Figure 2. Affective dimensions in a product ecosystem
factors, such as the intention of the customer, the physical or
psychological status, and the condition of the products, etc. It
With respect to the customer experience, the relationships presents serious challenges to designers, who are tempted to
between the focal customer and the other customers can be emphasize the technology itself while neglecting the subtle
explicitly defined. The customer-customer relationship is changes of affective human factors. This is especially true for
defined as   c , c | a  (for i  j , l  1, 2, ..., L ), such that in product ecosystem design which entails the ambience
1 i j l
considerations.
the context of activity a , l
Scenario-based design is suitable to deal with this type of
 1, c has a positive effect on the affective feeling of ci , problem because of its mechanisms in evoking reflections in

j
design, reconciling concreteness and flexibility, provoking
1   0, c j
does not contribute to the affective feeling of ci , work orientation, accommodating multiple perspectives, and
1, c
 j
has a negative effect on the affective feeling of ci . balancing abstraction and categorization (Carroll et al. 1998;
Carroll, 2006). In fact, scenarios suggest task-oriented
Next, the product-product relationship is defined as reflection in design, which is consistent with the requirements
 2  pi , p j | al  (for i  j ), such that in the context of activity of product ecosystem design.
al , Despite broad applications in systems analysis and design,
the scenario-based approaches remain vague in definition and
 1, p has a positive effect on the functioning of p , scope (Weidenhaupt et al., 1998). In this research, a scenario

j i

2   0, p has no effect on the functioning of p , refers to the environment in which a customer fulfills a general
j i
task in a set of interrelated activities. Accordingly,
1, p has a negative effect on the functioning of p .
 j i
scenario-based design for product ecosystems is realized in
three steps, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Similarly, the customer-product relationship is defined as
 3  ci , p j | al  , such that in the context of activity al ,
• Scenario development
 1, p j has a positive effect on the affective feeling of ci ,
 Scenario • Design parameter identification
3   0, p j does not contribute to the affective feeling of ci , Construction

1,
 p j has a negative effect on the affective feeling of ci .
• Environment presentation
Scenario • Experiment design
The affective feelings of a customer are formed as a Deployment
cumulative effect of customer perceptions along the customer
experience. It is concerned with multiple aspects of affective
• Evaluation criteria identification
customer needs being satisfied, including instrumental needs,
Scenario • Result processing
aesthetic, hedonic, contextual, and temporal needs (Forlizzi and Evaluation
Battarbee, 2004). It is grounded in the users’ information
processing experiences that emerge from the interaction of
products’ properties and users’ cognitive and affective Figure 3. Process of scenario-based product ecosystem design
processes, mediated by ambience within the product ecosystem.
Hence, the customer affective feeling has a temporal dimension
Scenario construction is concerned with the identification of
and can have different salient states, namely the customer
scenarios, the basic events in the scenarios, and the elements of
perception, whereas it also involves a dynamic dimension along
the ecosystem itself. Scenario deployment deals with the
the customer-ambience interaction process, namely the
presentation of scenarios to the customers or designers so as to
evoke design reflections. Finally, scenario evaluation closes
the design loop by evaluating how the design elements of the
product ecosystem address the customers’ affective needs.
This usually leads to the configuration of the ecosystem or
guidelines for designing the ecosystem. A detailed discussion
of the processes and techniques in the scenario-based design
approach are presented next.
Scenario Construction
Properly defined scenario is the prerequisite of eliciting the
customer requirements. It is also an important step toward the
design of the ecosystem to fulfill the requirements. The
construction of scenario must account for the interactions
between activities and design elements. The activities refer to
the series of tasks that the customer may fulfill during the usage
of the ecosystem; while the design elements include both the
products and non-focal customer in the ecosystem, i.e., the
ambience as perceived by the focal customer. Figure 4 show the
general process of constructing the scenarios.
Scenario 1 Product Product
1 N 1’
Requirements
3
Design 1 2 … L1
Task Element
4
Possibilities
Customer Customer
1 M1’
Scenario
Categorization … The objective of scenario deployment is to put the customers
Scenario Q Product Product
1 NQ’
3 adopted. Table 1 shows the possible strategies and technologies
1 2
… The focal customer can be virtual or real, where a virtual
Customer Customer
1 MQ ’
Figure 4. Scenario construction
The first step of scenario construction is to analyze the
activities/tasks in the customer experience and the design
elements of the ecosystem. By analyzing “what activities will
be involved in the product usage process”, the designer must be
aware of the customer requirements in the activities, and in turn
the design elements to address these requirements. On the other
hand, given a set of design elements, there are a number of
possibilities for the customers to carry out the activities.
Activities and design elements can be loosely identified
based on customer surveys, brainstorming, and analysis of the
documentation of product design. At this stage, no restriction is
applied on the activities or design elements to be included, as
this may confine the problem space and the solution space, thus,
precluding design innovation.
Next, the activities are classified into meaningful categories
of scenarios based on the purpose of customers using the
product ecosystem. As an example, cars can be used for
different purposes in daily life, such as, travelling to office,
going shopping, sightseeing, etc. The scenario categorization
process provides a convenient way to identifying representative
situations for the customer experiences.
The next step is the specification of actual scenarios
according to the infrastructure of ecosystems. Essentially, the
products and customers that form the ambience of the focal
customer are streamlined along the activity sequence for
representing the customer experience.
The scenarios constructed may be defined at different levels
of details depending on the availability of information. This is
in fact the elegance of scenario-based design in that abstraction
level may vary for different design purposes (Carroll, 2006).
For example, a scenario may be a rough sketch of the activities
to be carried out, in addition to the products and customers, as
detached from individual activities. The actual activity
sequence, and product-customer interactions will be monitored
and recorded in the experiments carried out in the scenario
deployment stage. Alternatively, the activity sequences, and
product/customer interactions can be predefined with detailed
logic of ‘cause-effect’ and ‘cause-affect’. This establishes the
foundation of simulation-based methods in the scenario
deployment and evaluation stages.
Scenario Deployment
or designers in the scenarios constructed in the previous stage,
so as to observe the user’s response and elicit the customer
needs. Depending on the way the scenarios are presented to the
focal customer, alternative strategies and technologies are
LQ suitable to different scenario constructs.
customer is a digital model that simulates the behavior of the
customer. On the other hand, the scenario may be virtual, real,
or a mixture of both. A virtual scenario consists of digital
models of products and customers, whereas a real scenario
consists of the products and customers in real life. A scenario
can also be presented as a combination of real and virtual
models. Thus, a mixed environment is presented to the
customer.
Table 1. Scenario deployment strategies
Scenario
Virtual Real Mixed
Customer
Virtual Simulation - -
Virtual Cognitive Cognitive
Real
Reality Task Analysis Task Analysis
 A virtual customer can only be put into a virtual scenario. In
this situation, scenario deployment is realized using
simulation-based approaches. This strategy relies on detailed
scenario specifications, such as the causal relationships among
activities, the properties of products, the behaviors of the virtual
customers. Moreover, the cognitive and affective behaviors of
the focal customer have to be simulated in the model. This
presents a major challenge to this strategy considering that
simulation of human behavior using digital models is not
reliable and robust enough for practical use. Another essential
technical challenge is how to model the reasoning logic that
accommodates the uncertainties of both the customer and the
ambience. Possible solutions for this challenge include fuzzy
cognitive map (Dickerson and Kosko, 1994; Miao et al., 2001),
and fuzzy Petri nets (Cao and Arthur, 1995; Chen, 2002).
A real customer can interact with virtual, real, and mixed
scenarios. Typically, a virtual scenario environment is realized
using virtual reality (VR) technologies, where a VR
environment consists of various digital product models and
customer models. While the advancement of technologies have
made it possible to render the visual effects and properties of
products with high fidelity, the simulation of customer behavior
– the non-focal customer in this situation – is far from practical
application.
Alternatively, the focal customer can be put into a real
environment, where he/she completes the activities according to
the designation of the scenario. This presents the natural and
practical application of scenario-based design. The customers
can interact with products and other non-focal customers freely
and respond to various stimuli spontaneously. Real time
monitoring system can be used to observe the customer
responses, through which the feedback of customers (e.g.,
voices, facial expressions, motions, respirations, etc.) is
recorded throughout the survey process. The classical cognitive
task analysis method can be used in the process (Schraagen et
al., 2000), so as to elicit useful information including the
customers’ affective responses. Nevertheless, the real scenario
may not be constructed at the conceptual stage of designing
product systems. In addition, building a real scenario for new
product systems can be costly.
Finally, a mixed environment can be build by including
digital models of products and real non-focal customers. This
strategy effectively saves the cost for building real product
systems and alleviates the difficulty of simulating the customer
behavior of digital human model. In effect, the focal customer
and the non-focal customer use the virtual product system
simultaneously and interact with each other in the VR
environment. The customers’ responses can be monitored in the
same way as in the ‘real customer-real scenario’ situation.
Scenario Evaluation
Data collected from scenario deployment is analyzed in this
stage to determine the effectiveness of the product ecosystem in
addressing the customers’ affective needs. Scenario evaluation
involves two steps, namely, (1) selecting evaluation criteria and
(2) correlating evaluation criteria with design elements.
Evaluation criteria
With focus on the affective human factors, the evaluation
criteria are specified as the affective descriptors that signify the
customers’ affective requirements. For products that are
familiar to the customers, the affective needs are evident, and
hence can be defined explicitly. On the other hand, for new
products, the affective aspects are not so obvious. Thus, the
affective descriptors have to be elicited during or after the
deployment stage. In this situation, the customers are asked
questions on their affective feelings, such as, what product
features are impressive and lead to your pleasurable experience,
are there any features that you find annoying, how do you
describe your feeling when using xxx feature? Answers to these
survey questions are analyzed by design experts, who will
extract the representative affective descriptors.
Mapping affective needs into design elements
Assume that a set of K affective descriptors is identified and
is represented as X   xk  . The ambience for a customer
consists of both non-focal customers ( E  c , c , ..., cM  )
Ci 
1 2 '
and products ( E   p , p , ..., p N  ). Because E is not a
Pi  Ci 
1 2 '
controllable factor of the product ecosystem, it is not
considered as the design elements. Thus, the design elements
Pi 
of the product ecosystem is selected from E , and are
denoted as Y   y h  (for h  1, 2, ..., N ') . Also assume that a
total of S scenarios are constructed and deployed in the
previous stages. For each scenario s  1, S  , a group of
customers are tested, which are considered as the focal
customers in that particular scenario. The set of affective
descriptors for the particular scenario is denoted as
 
X s  xk  X . The design elements for the same scenario is
* *
 
s
denoted as Ys  yh s  Y . The problem is reduced to
* *
* *
finding the mapping relationship between X and Y s s
This research adopts the association rule mining mechanism
to establish the correlations between the affective needs and
design elements (Jiao et al., 2007). In general, such
correlations are presented as X s  Ys , where an association
* *
rule ‘  ’indicates an inference from the precedent to the
consequence. The general form of an association rule in
association rule mining is given as:
1   2    k    K  1   2   l    L
 Support  p% ; Confidence  c%
where  k  exist xk *
( k  1,  , K ) and   exist  y 
h
*
( h  1,  , N ' ) are Boolean values; and p% and c% refer
to the support and confidence levels for this rule, respectively.
The formula states that whenever a set of customer affective
needs exists, a particular set of design elements must be
available to accommodate these needs. The confidence denotes
the strength of an association, and the support indicates the
frequency of the occurring patterns contained in the rule.
 CASE STUDY Table 3. Design elements of car product ecosystem
Description Code
The proposed scenario-based approach has been applied to
Steering wheel material_leather Y1
the design of car ecosystems. A car is a typical consumer
Steering wheel material_plastic Y2
product that integrates a number of features, each interacting
with the user and other features. In many situations, multiple Steering wheel material_wood ornament Y3
customers (e.g., the driver and the passengers) may use the car Steering power assist Y4
simultaneously, where they influence the behavior and Gearbox _auto Y5
perception of others. Apparently, traditional design methods Gearbox_manual Y6
that focus on individual features of the car product miss the Global positioning system (GPS) Y7
important dimension of customer experience through extensive Visual display unit (VDU) Y8
customer-product-ambience interactions. This case study External object detector Y9
embodies an effort to address this issue from the ecosystem Auto parking processor Y10
perspective, while employing techniques of the scenario-based Audio_standard Y11
design approach. Audio_subwoofer Y12
Voice indicator Y13
Affective Needs
Table 4. Product configurations
Affective needs for the car product are evident due to
customers’ familiarity with the product. Nevertheless, the Design element Car 1 Car2 Car3
entire set of affective needs is immense and was not covered in Y1 Y N N
this paper. In the case study, ten representative aspects of Y2 N Y N
affective needs are addressed, as are denoted by the affective
descriptors shown in Table 2. Y3 N N Y
Y4 Y N N
Table 2. Affective descriptors for car ecosystem Y5 Y Y N
Descriptor Code Descriptor Code
Y6 N N Y
Comfortable X1 Elegant X6 Y7 Y Y Y
Simple X2 Spacious X7 Y8 Y N Y
Advanced X3 Entertaining X8 Y9 Y N N
Secured X4 Luxurious X9 Y10 Y N N
Smart X5 Accessible X10 Y11 Y Y Y
Y12 Y N N
Product Ecosystem Elements
Y13 Y N N
The car ecosystem consists of the customers, the car features
(each considered as a product in this research) and the Table 5. Activities and interacting product/customer
interrelationship among them. In this research, the customers Activity Code Customer Product
include the driver (denoted as C1) and the front seat passenger
Start up A1 C1 Y1,Y2,Y3,Y5,Y6
(denoted as C2), and the features of the car are restricted to
thirteen design elements, as listed in Table 3. Change gear A2 C1 Y5,Y6
In the subsequent experiments, three configurations of cars Steer A3 C1 Y1,Y2,Y3
are tested, which are actually different combinations of the Park A4 C1 Y1-Y6,Y9,Y10
design elements. The configurations of the three cars are
shown in Table 4. In the table, ‘Y’ indicates that the respective Brake A5 C1 Y9,Y13
design element is included in the product configuration, and Listen to music A6 C1;C2 Y11,Y12
‘N’ indicates that the design element is not included in the Listen to radio A7 C1;C2 Y11,Y12
product configuration.
Select music A8 C1;C2 Y8
Moreover, without delving into specific scenarios, a total of
twelve basic activities are specified, together with the potential Watch TV A9 C2 Y8
interacting design elements and customers, as shown in Table Play game A10 C2 Y8
5. It should be noted that these activities are related to the Read message A11 C1;C2 Y8
product features discussed in this research, rather than a
Check travel route A12 C1 Y7,Y8
complete list of activities in car usage.
Scenario Specification and Experiment Design
Three scenarios are constructed and deployed to examine
how the design elements in the product ecosystem address the
customer affective needs. These scenarios include: (1) A
customer goes shopping with a friend, (2) A customer goes to
the office; and (3) A customer travels along the beach for
sightseeing. As an example, Figure 5 shows a typical process
of the first scenario, using car configuration 1. The activities
that fall within the spectrum of this case study (Table 5) are
highlighted in bold font.
Sarah decided to go shopping out of town with her friend
Paula. She started up the engine and drive out of the parking
lot. As a habit, she switched on the radio and listened to
(radio) the traffic information. … Sarah parked the car in the
waiting area near Paula’s house and waited until she came. …
Not sure of how to get to the shopping mall, Sarah asked Paula
to check the travel route using the GPS. Paula, unfamiliar with
this feature, was very interested in how it worked. So, Sarah
parked the car beside the road and told Paula how to operate
the map in the VDU and how to select a route. …On the way,
Paula wanted to listen to some music and she was curious of
selecting a list of music using the VDU…
Figure 5. An excerpt of scenario 1
The experiment was carried out in real car ecosystems
according to the three car configurations. A group of 25
customers were investigated in the experiment, where each
customer was assigned one task belonging to the above three
scenarios. The actual activities involved in a scenario varied
due to different customer habits, as well as the car
configurations. The customers’ activities were captured using
digital cameras so as to be analyzed offline. Moreover, the
customers were asked to evaluate the car in terms of the
affective descriptors after he/she complete the entire scenario
-based process. For the evaluation, the customer was requested
to respond to specific affective descriptors with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’;
and whenever a “Yes’ response was given, he/she was
prompted to recall one or more activities that lead to such an
evaluation. For example, a customer may consider a car as
‘smart’ when a voice warning message is emitted for a sudden
braking.
Scenario Evaluation Results
Analysis of customer behavior is conducted at the activity
level, namely, the activities that fall within the scope of the
activity list (available in Table 5) are extracted from the
customer experience recorded in the video clips. Next, the
design elements are identified with respect to each activity.
This results in a list of records of activities together with the
design elements. However, such an activity may or may not be
associated with a customer evaluation depending on how the
customers have been effective in recalling their affective
feelings. The records without a customer evaluation are
filtered out as non-informative data. Table 6 shows an excerpt
of activity records, where the shaded ones are non-informative
ones and should be filtered out.
It should be noted the scenario information will influence to
the inference relationship between the design elements and the
affective descriptors. This is because a car feature that is useful
or appealing in one scenario may not be so in another scenario.
For example, a superb audio system with subwoofer, which is
described as ‘Entertaining’ for the sightseeing scenario, is not
relevant when a user rushes to the office. Nevertheless, a
designer must be aware that a car will be used in multiple
scenarios after a customer purchases it. Thus, it should be
designed to address multiple aspects of usage.
Next, scenario evaluation is carried out based on the
ecosystem configuration and the corresponding customer
response. A total of 102 records are identified, where each
record denotes the presence of a set of design elements and
corresponding customer’s affective evaluations of the product
ecosystem. Next, these records are analyzed using the
association rule mining technique. In this research, Magnum
Opus (http://www.giwebb.com/) is employed to find the
mapping relationships between the design elements and
affective descriptors. The mining process leads to a set of 67
association rules, which is partially shown in Table 7.
As can be seen from the table, the affective descriptors are
explicitly related to specific design elements. For example,
Rule 1 (X1Y2) indicates that whenever a comfortable
feeling is needed, a steering wheel with leather cover is needed.
This effectively gives a designer useful message when
designing the steering wheel, namely, a leather material
contributes to the comfortable feeling.
DISCUSSIONS
The ecosystem formalism paves the way towards product
design at the systems level. In contrast with traditional
methods that are centered on the focal product or customer, the
ecosystem provides yet another important dimension, namely
the ambience, which accommodates the interactions among
products and customers. This effectively alleviates the
difficulty of designing products in isolation from the actual
customer usage. In practice, the ecosystem is expected to
embody more added-value due to a cohort performance
consideration of multiple product features in relation to the
customer affective feelings. In other words, instead of
improving specific product features, which more likely than
not, leads to local optima, the entirety of system is considered
such that the value profile is optimized globally.
Scenario-based design is an effective method that includes
customer experience in the design loop. This research
establishes an infrastructure for coordinating the customer
activities, customer affective states, and the flow of
information in the task-customer-product cycle. Scenarios
evoke the customer perception and experience in design,
which is helpful to designers in an effort to identify and
develop the correct problem requirements. Scenario-based
design also provides the flexibility of scenario construction
and deployment according to the information availability, cost
constraints and performance requirements.
 Table 6. Activity record with configuration and evaluation
Activity Design element Affective Evaluation
Y1 Y2 Y3 Y4 Y5 Y6 Y7 Y8 Y9 Y10 Y11 Y12 Y13 X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 X6 X7 X8 X9 X10
A3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
A6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0
A7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
A10 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
A4 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0
A8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
A11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
A12 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0
A9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0
A1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
A4 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
A5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
… … …
A3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0

Table 7. Association rules for scenario evaluation scenarios based on the feedback of the test-runs.
Rule Inference Relationship Support Confidence
CONCLUSIONS
1 X1  Y2 0.123 0.224
2 X2  Y11 0.151 0.213 In view of the challenges of designing products for
3 X4  Y1&Y5 0.130 0.560 customers’ affective needs, this research presents a
4 X5  Y8 0.422 0.637 scenario-based approach for designing product ecosystems.
5 X8&X9  Y11&Y12 0.135 0.232 Design for product ecosystem suggests itself to be a novel
approach as compared to traditional product design methods
6 X1&X4  Y2&Y9 0.423 0.571
owning to the consideration of the ambience. As a key idea of
7 X3&X8  Y8&Y11 0.252 1.00 product ecosystem, the ambience accommodates the entities of
8 X7&X8  Y8 0.445 0.727 an ecosystem and their interactions. It also effectively account
9 X3&X10  Y8 & Y11 &Y12 0.225 0.575 for the process-oriented customer experience in the product
10 X3&X4 &X8  Y4&Y8&Y11 0.306 0.543 design life cycle to address the affective human factors.
Moreover, a systematic approach is developed which
11 X1&X10  Y10 0.173 0.285
integrates scenario construction, scenario deployment, and
12 X3&X6&X9  Y7&Y8 0.211 0.323 scenario evaluation into a general framework. A number of
13 X5&X9&X10  Y2&Y7&Y8 0.412 0.521 technologies are incorporated in the framework depending on
… … the target of design, the availability of information, and
resource constraints. A case study of car ecosystem design
67 X3&X5  Y8 &Y9&Y10 0.308 0.412
demonstrates that the scenario-based method is applicable to
consumer product design. It is proved that the method can
Moreover, the scenario-based approach is conducive to the effectively provide design guidelines for designing ecosystems
elicitation of the affective aspects of customer needs. This is with consideration of customer affective needs.
because the affective responses are usually embedded in the
process-oriented customer experience, where the affective Acknowledgments This research is partially sponsored by the
states of customers are dynamic and difficult to capture using European Commission (DG Information Society and Media) in
traditional methods. The scenario-based design accommodates the framework of the 6th Research Program (FP6) under grant
the modeling and analysis of the customer experience in IST-5-035030-STREP (www.cater-ist.org).
relation with the product and ambience that evolves over time.
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