in a competitive and highly saturated international market environment, design has a prominent role in “new product development”. design has evolved into an integrated activity that by receiving the signals of societies and markets (both being in a constant state of flux) and translating them into new products and strategies. this new era requires that the designer primarily creates a problem setting framework, necessary to identify or pose new challenges and then shift to a problem solving framework to suggest the appropriate products or services. design, as a discipline,  no longer focusing simply on human needs but also on human desires

design driven vs user centered brand & product strategy

design-driven strategy aims to radically alter the emotional and symbolic image of brands and products. its outcome is pushed to the market with the intention to suggest the brand’s vision away from any kind of competition, market or user analysis. It should be considered as a bold way of manifestation to provoke the dialogue between the brand and its audience. design in this case is the medium to discover latent socio-cultural messages, to compose them to new concepts and transform them into products/services

user-centered strategy is employing a number of methods and techniques to identify social or user needs in order to deliver products/services answering those specific need. in this case, the market pulls by prescribing through its demands and needs the nature and characteristics of the products/services to be developed

 the model

lexicon:

context is the broader frame of a business’s operational environment. since this frame is business- and time- dependent, every single case requires the formulation of a new context each time. the formulation starts with the identification, followed by the analysis, and finally the synthesis of factors related to the corporate macro & micro environment

actors are the individuals but also the entities within an organization, household etc. involved in the decision making, purchasing and using process of a product or service. according to aristotle “all human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire”. here, it is of primary concern to analyze the most significant of these causes for each project, and to pose and answer all the relevant questions starting with why, what, when, where and how

domain is the specific focus area of project and usually, but not necessarily, it is defined by the design brief. the domain may be a particular product, service or even an icon/image. here, the task is to find the appropriate balance between the visceral (aesthetics) and behavioral (effective) aspects of the design language to be applied