A consumer-oriented design thinking model for product design education

For design education, although different international design organizations have developed design thinking models (DTM), these DTMs mainly focus on improving innovation but ignore the actual demands of users. This paper proposes a consumer-oriented DTM to implement innovation and evaluation based on accurately grasping users' demands. The consumer-oriented DTM consists of three phases, namely preparation, creation and evaluation. In the preparation phase, the evaluation grid method is used to obtain a three-layer demand chart from skilled users; this chart is then used to design questionnaires to get charm factors. In the creation phase, the concrete charm factors are taken as the design objectives to guide the innovative design. Several methods are integrated, including the objectives tree method, function analysis method, and finite structure method, to obtain a group of alternatives. In the evaluation phase, the original evaluation items are taken as the evaluation criteria, and then the best solution is selected. The highchair is considered a design case to elaborate on how students use the consumer-oriented DTM to carry out design practice. The final results verify that the new DTM applies to classroom teaching, which improves the commercialization of design concepts and cultivates students' ability to communicate with others.