Effect of technology-driven products in the future of product design and development

Abstract

Recent products tend to incorporate multiple functionalities, embedded electronics or multifunctional behavior. The trend has been to increase the number of features available in a single product. The increasing availability and decreasing price of circuitry facilitate these “advanced products“. However, this trend has its downside. Many users do not take advantage of most of the product features, some users do not realize the entire range of functionalities in products they purchased, and often users cannot even keep up with the complex features that keep being added to products, often causing frustration or incorrect usage. We argue in this paper that this effect results from natural competition, due to the need of providing differentiating products. This trend has resulted in specific product designs that allow users to interact with all available functionalities. Moreover, we argue this trend will necessarily reach a threshold when a reversed effect might be observed and where the majority of users will demand a simple and effective “basic product“ with multiple add-ons, following a modular product architecture philosophy, and which will create entirely different needs in terms of product design. In this paper we discuss what that change may imply and which type of product architectures offer competitive advantages for such solutions.