An innovation aid for developing products leading to LOHAS

This study proposes an aid for facilitating product design, leading to LOHAS (Lifestyle Of Health and Sustainability) by integrating persuasive technology and case based reasoning. A case library includes 98 existing products, in which users have been persuaded to a more human experience for fun, health, or energy harvesting. For each case, information that relates to a domain model covering target behaviors, users’ motives, users’ enhanced ability, design principles, and applied technologies are extracted and stored. By following the concept of case based reasoning, a conditional search has been conducted to retrieve cases and get useful suggestions of design principles and applicable technologies by inputting target behaviors and target customers’ motives and abilities. A computer program is written to expedite the conditional search and retrieve useful cases from the case library. The designer can either be directly inspired by referring to retrieved cases or start with suggested design principles and applicable technologies for achieving an innovative product design.